Let’s be clear about what happened with that social media post by Donald Trump.
The one-minute video was re-posted from the bowels of Trump’s right-wing echo chamber, Truth Social. At the very end of the video, an unconnected, one-second cartoon clip flashed up, depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
It was one of many items re-posted by Trump’s account in quick succession in the middle of the night, which is not unusual. The White House told us it was a staffer, not Trump. The re-post has now been taken down.
It’s not clear if whoever made the post even watched the video until the end, or noticed the horrifically racist meme that popped up. Trump says he did not watch it all before handing it over to be sent out into the world.
But would that have made a difference? Trump’s account has shared all sorts of rancid material from the depths of the far-right ecosystem, including AI clips of himself as a pilot dumping loads of faeces on protesting Americans, and fake images of Obama being arrested by the FBI.
The president’s bar for public distribution is very low. In his own words: “When people give me things, I post them.”
Moreover, under Trump, the bar for standards of public discourse has plunged.
The actual video that his account shared was less offensive than the awful Obama meme, but still dangerous – it was spreading misinformation about election fraud. Expect to see much more of that as the midterms approach.
Whether Trump or his team intended to share the racist meme of the Obamas is moot. When you play in the sewer, you’re going to get dirty.
But Trump has raked muck in that sewer so long that it is no longer possible to be shocked or outraged by what it produces.
As history professor Ian Reifowitz told this masthead for a piece about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal this week, there is no longer an expectation in the US media or polity that actions will have consequences.
“If a person has done 500 things that should have ended his career, then who cares about the 501st?” Reifowitz said.
Trump’s behaviour is particularly egregious when it comes to Obama. It is difficult to describe it as anything other than overt racism whenever Trump refers to the 44th president as “Barack Hussein Obama”, as he frequently does. After all, he doesn’t call Biden “Joe Robinette Biden”.
Is Trump the kind of deep-seated white supremacist who enjoys and circulates memes depicting black people as primates? Not really.
But is he capable of racism? Yes. And has he brought about a breakdown in American public life and standards whereby that kind of racism has become normalised and even celebrated? Absolutely.
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.