Yes, the Trump video featuring Obama as a monkey is racist. But it’s also about elections

Welcome to Black History Month, 2026 in style.

President Trump posted a video on his social media site Thursday that featured animated images of former President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as monkeys.

The White House removed the post on Friday, and after first calling it more than a meme, they dubbed it a staffer’s mistake. for sure

But while the justified outrage of this blatant racism turns itself into a short media circus (because we all know something will happen in about three minutes), let’s look a little deeper to see why this video is more than an insult to everything America stands for, or should stand for anyway.

It’s no coincidence that images of Obama are deeply embedded within a video about a voter fraud conspiracy from the 2020 election (which is untrue, if I need to say it again). The video is an escalation of potential attacks on voting rights and voting access in the midterms.

Melina Abdullah told me on Friday, “There’s definitely something to do with the vote.” She is a professor at Cal State Los Angeles and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles.

Read more: Trump shared, then deleted, a racist image of Obama. The White House blamed a staffer

“It’s not just about Obama,” added Brian Levine, professor emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino and founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. “It’s about the people [perceived as] Undermining our elections and our democracy.”

I caught up with Levin the day after he turned in a chapter on authoritarianism for a new book, which looks at how discrimination and social hierarchies relate to power.

Let me summarize. Weaker groups are dangerously broken and unfit to be full citizens, so a small group of elites can justify power in any way to protect society from these vile and evil influences.

Let me make that message even simpler: black and brown people are evil and should not be allowed to participate in democracy because they do not deserve rights.

How does that play out at the ballot box?

Everything about voter ID and election integrity is really about preventing people from voting – people who are legally entitled to vote. Those least likely to obtain proof of citizenship — which requires a passport or birth certificate, as well as money and knowing how to obtain such documents — are often black or brown people. They are often poor, or even poor, and therefore have less time and money to obtain documents, and they also live in urban areas where they share polling places.

Is it such a stretch to imagine any kind of federal oversight of those kinds of polling places, alienating — or simply threatening — legal voters who have long formed a strong bloc of the Democratic base?

Let’s hope that never happens. But undermining the legitimacy of current black and brown voters is systemic and concerning, both Levin and Abdullah said.

Trump’s latest video is “part of a flood of bigotry and conspiracy related to the election and immigrants and black people, and it’s important to condemn the way these puzzle pieces are put together to label African Americans and immigrants as a threat to democracy in terms of voting,” Levine said.

The premise of the video in question is that Democrats engaged in a complex and decades-long scheme to steal the election. It is presented as a documentary, and pictures of Obama are inserted almost as a subliminal flash near the end.

If you’ve missed the white supremacist postings that are now commonplace in official government communications from the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security, I assure you that Levin is correct and that this Primate video is indeed part of a “firehose” of white nationalist rhetoric not only from Trump, but from the federal government as a whole.

For example, the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice has focused its attention on sentencing diversity, equity, and inclusion. Just this week, another federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, launched an investigation against Nike for allegedly discriminating against white people in the workplace.

“It’s not even dog whistling, but the xeroxing of the exact kinds of terms I’ve been seeing on white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites for decades,” Levin said.

It’s not my place or purpose to warn black people about racism, because that would be ridiculous and insulting, but I will warn the rest of us because in the end, totalitarianism targets everyone. This video makes a clear statement that Trump’s vision of America is one in which every non-white group, every vulnerable group, is truly a second-class citizen.

“He’s enabling a whole group of people who want to take this country back to a time when widespread violent white supremacy was enabled by law,” Abdullah said. “What they mean is to recapture the old-school, repressive racism that existed before the 1965, pre-Voting Rights Act.”

Read more: Chabria: MAGA launched another ‘Save the Children’ campaign targeting LGBTQ+ families

That message, Levine said, “resonates with the civilized part of his base,” and when fed into the system consistently, can have violent consequences.

Levin uses the example of when Trump tweeted during the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a phrase with a violent and racist history.

Levin said black people have always been the primary targets of hate crimes in the United States, but after that tweet, it was the “worst day ever” for racially-targeted violence.

“When a high transmitter, like the president, broadcasts imagery in terms of prejudice, it creates these stereotypes and conspiracy theories, which are then the basis for more conspiracy theories and aggression,” he added.

Abdullah said he worries that even if voters don’t officially sanction the crackdown, those emboldened conspiracy theorists will take action anyway.

“So the people who are the so-called ‘surveillance’, the self-appointed monitors … this is what is pulling people out of the voter line, and so this is what he is deliberately whipping,” she said.

Keep your eye on the ball, people, because the far-right Republicans running the show are laser-focused on it. The mid-term elections have to go their way for them to stay in power.

The easiest way to ensure that result is to allow only voters who look your way.

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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.