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TRUMP WON’T APOLOGIZE AMID BIPARTISAN OUTRAGE OVER POSTING RACIST VIDEO OF OBAMAS AS APES

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President Donald Trump ignited a bipartisan political firestorm after posting a video that portrayed former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michele Obama as apes. What followed were two significant stories.

1. Trump posting the video of African-Americans as apes which is part of a long history of this particular racist slur. This comes amid an outcry of the Trump administration’s National Park Services’ plans to remove the the word “racist” from Medgar and Myrlie Evers’ home when describing the assassinated civil rights leader’s killer.. The home is memorialized by the National Park Service. It also is a backdrop to longtime charges that Trump is racist and his father Fred Trump was racist.

2. A day of shifting often contradictory explanations on who posted the video and why which further damaged the White House Press secretary’s credibility. Trump eventually said he indeed posted it but hadn’t looked at the ending — and refused to apologize. Trump is known for his refusal to offer apologies. Which keeps controversies open and alive.

The New York Times:

President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, but he insisted he had nothing to apologize for even after he deleted the video following an outcry.

The clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and was among a flurry of links posted by Mr. Trump late Thursday night. It was the latest in a pattern by Mr. Trump of promoting offensive imagery and slurs about Black Americans and others.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday, Mr. Trump said he only saw the beginning of the video. “I just looked at the first part, it was about voter fraud in some place, Georgia,” Mr. Trump said. “I didn’t see the whole thing.”

He then tried to deflect blame, suggesting he had given the link to someone else to post. “I gave it to the people, generally they’d look at the whole thing but I guess somebody didn’t,” he told reporters.

The White House response to the video over the course of the day — from defiance to retreat to doubling down — was a remarkable glimpse into an administration trying to control the damage in the face of widespread outrage, including from the president’s own party.

The clip was in line with Mr. Trump’s history of making degrading remarks about people of color, women and immigrants, and he has for years singled out the Obamas. Across Mr. Trump’s administration, racist images and slogans have become common on government websites and accounts, with the White House, Labor Department and Homeland Security Department all having promoted posts that echo white supremacist messaging.

But the latest video struck a nerve that appeared to take the White House by surprise. The depiction of Mr. and Mrs. Obama as apes perpetuates a racist trope, historically used by slave traders and segregationists to dehumanize Black people and justify lynchings.

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s only Black Republican and a close ally of Mr. Trump, wrote on X that he hoped the post was fake “because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”

“The President should remove it,” he said.

Mr. Scott is the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm in charge of trying to hold the Senate, a key role leading up to the midterm election in November.

CNN:

President Donald Trump refused to apologize Friday after posting and then deleting a racist video depicting former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes in a jungle, insisting he hadn’t seen the final frames containing the offensive content and blaming a staffer for the mistake.

The explanation, offered to reporters on Air Force One, was the first acknowledgement that Trump himself had screened at least part of the video that had thrown the White House into damage control mode for most of the day. The White House said earlier, after the video was removed, that a staffer had posted it in error.

The video was posted late Thursday night — and remained online for nearly 12 hours — before the White House took it down amid bipartisan outrage, including from close Trump allies. The president, however, insisted Friday evening the video was taken down “as soon as we found out about it.”

“I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine,” he said, referring to the first part of the video that contained debunked claims about fraud in voting machines.

“It was a very strong post in terms of voter fraud,” he went on. “Nobody knew that that was in the end. If they would have looked, they would have seen it, and probably they would have had the sense to take it down.”

Trump said after he watched the first section of the video, he passed it on to a staffer, who he said should have watched it to the end.

“Somebody slipped and missed a very small part,” he said.

But when asked directly whether he would apologize amid GOP calls to do so, he declined.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t make a mistake.”

The Atlantic’s Hana Kiros said the posting was exactly what it looked like:

The clip is on the screen for only a moment before the recording returns to the voting-machine video. And just before noon today, both posts of the video were removed from the president’s Truth Social account. (When I asked why, a White House official who declined to provide their name claimed that an unnamed employee “erroneously made the post.”)

In the interim, hundreds if not thousands of people responded to the clip with enthusiasm. Immediately after the video was first posted on Truth Social, the memecoin $APEBAMA was minted. Within 12 hours, more than $4 million worth of $APEBAMA had been traded back and forth. In an X group with the same name that now has hundreds of members, the pinned tweet implies that the meme stock will succeed because of how outrageous the video is: “this is pretty much on par with him calling Obama a nigga.” Some members posted their own depictions of Obama as a monkey or ape. The ape video’s apparent creator, the X user @xerias_x, reposted the full video to their X account early this morning. Besides the Obamas, the video shows a menagerie of Democratic politicians as animals, bowing down to Trump, who appears as a lion. It now has more than 1 million views. (@xerias_x also seems to be the originator of an AI-generated video Trump reposted in October that shows the president raining down what appears to be excrement on protesters from the sky.)

The “joke” that Trump’s account spread is plainly sinister. The idea that Black people sit somewhere between white people and apes has long been used to justify cruelty. In 1377, a historian wrote that Africans “have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals,” meaning they “are, as a whole, submissive to slavery.” Cartoons circulated during the Civil War were printed with images similar to the one Trump posted: One labels a monkey holding a book upside down as a NEGRO-MAN; another depicts a Black man on all fours, accompanied by the words WHAR’S JEFF DAVIS. In 1906, a man born in what was then the Belgian Congo, Ota Benga, was displayed at the Bronx Zoo in a cage with an orangutan. In 1975, white teenagers harassed Black students desegregating a Boston public school with the chant “Two, four, six, eight, assassinate the nigger apes.”