Most Americans were in bed Thursday when President Donald Trump — or someone acting on his behalf — posted a video on Truth Social with an image that depicted former President Barack Obama and his wife as apes.
The post has since disappeared, but the internet never forgets, and Trump has certainly lost more of the normies, the ordinary Americans who supported him despite misgivings and are tired of trying to defend affronts like this.
Appearing on Truth Social shortly before midnight, the image was brief and wildly out of context, coming at the end of a video talking about voting machines in the 2020 election.
The White House press secretary initially berated the press. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” Karoline Leavitt said.
The thing is, an offense like this does matter to the American public, especially when it comes from the president. Even Trump’s allies were appalled, with South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim Scott calling it “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”
Utah Rep. Burgess Owens told Eva Terry of the Deseret News, “We all make mistakes. I know President Trump’s heart. President Trump cares about everyone, particularly those who are having a hard time. ... So I think we should give everybody a little space, we make mistakes.”
On X Thursday morning, there was speculation that that image popped up accidentally, an auto-play from a juvenile AI rendition of scenes from “The Lion King,” with faces of politicians, including Trump, imposed on animals. Videos in a feed do often follow each other in rapid succession, and another politician might be able to argue that this is what happened, and it was a bad editing job, nothing else.
But the fact that this came from Trump suggested otherwise. It suggested that the image was intentional, designed to hijack the news cycle for any number of reasons.
It could be that Trump knew the outrage would bring eyes to what he really wanted the world to see — the video about an election he remains obsessed with even though the world has moved on. It’s also possible that the president wanted the press focused on this, and not any other manner of things going on — or about to go on — in the world right now, from the Epstein files to Iran.
Or it might simply be that the nation is spending too much time talking about Bad Bunny this week and not about him.
With this president, anything is possible.
Every time he does something that everyday Americans consider worryingly out of line, his supporters are left to consider the question that Thomas Friedman once posed: Crazy like a fox, or just crazy?
Neither explanation worked here. It was more like: Dumb or dumber, or actually racist?
The GOP can’t afford the latter to be true, but neither can it afford the former. The normies that voted for Trump despite serious misgivings can only take so much. He’s beginning to lose some of them on immigration. Their finances haven’t measurably improved. He dangled DOGE dividends and tariff rebate checks that didn’t materialize, while a grand ballroom did. Meanwhile, he proposes an astonishing array of things be named after him, or bear his likeness, from coins to buildings to national park passes, displaying the hubris of a rogue 2-year-old.
The shock and awe of his first 100 days seems less like determined, principled righting of wrongs and more like sustained, destructive chaos. Now this.
Twelve hours after the video was posted, it finally was removed. An unnamed White House official told CNN’s Alayna Treene, “A White House staffer erroneously made the post.”
Believe that, and the White House has some meme coins to sell you.
Utah Sen. John Curtis, a Republican, took the White House to task, writing on X, “The post was blatantly racist and inexcusable. It should never have been posted or left published for so long.”
Meanwhile, the soft padding of paws we hear in the forest isn’t always the king of the jungle that Trump tries to be, for sometimes he is simply the king of distraction.
It’s the quiet exodus of the normies, shaking their heads in disgust.