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Donald Trump posted a video online depicting the Obamas as monkeys.
This isn’t shocking – or at least it shouldn’t be. Trump has built an entire political career on saying the quietly racist part out loud and then challenging the country to do something about it.
Of housing discrimination in the 1970s and 1970s Central Park Five ads on Birtherism and comments on “shithole countries”, the man has been using the same racist playbook for decades. This is the same man who told congresswomen of color go back to where they came from and warned about it immigrants “poison the blood” of the nation. At this point, treating all of this as shocking requires a kind of practiced amnesia.
Depiction of the first black president and first lady as monkeys are racist, dehumanizing and insulting in ways that aren’t exactly subtle or remotely original.
Still, it’s important that the current President of the United States shares this video, even if he ultimately deletes it.
And what happened next is more important.
Where’s the blowback?
This latest episode, which took place the first week of February, is not just another entry in America’s long, ugly scrapbook of anti-black dehumanization. It’s a stress test — actually a very simple test of how much overt anti-Black brutality American institutions can sustain while still pretending this is a democracy.
History suggests the answer is “quite a lot.”
To be fair, a handful of Republicans objected to Trump’s racist AI sloppiness. By my count, eleven Republican members of Congress have managed to locate both their conscience and a microphone. Some even managed to say the word ‘racist’, which in modern Republican politics is tantamount to setting yourself on fire.
But here’s the problem: nothing happened after that. Nothing changed.
As with so many past examples of egregious CEO deviance, this moment was brushed aside as simply another example of Trump being Trump — filed away as background noise rather than a political event with political consequences.
But the relevant question after Trump posted the offensive video was never whether a few people could locate their conscience long enough to issue a press release. The real question was whether this would have consequences that would meaningfully change Trump’s standing within the Republican party.
That didn’t happen.
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The mainstream media behaved as if a few Republicans expressing their disapproval became proof that our democracy is healthy. We saw headlines about Republican “pushback” and stories about internal tensions.
The New York Times described a “unusually strong and public outcry”, as if a few disapproving sentences from a small part of the Republican party were meaningful. Al Jazeera called it a “outpouring of bipartisan condemnation,” which seems hyperbolic when 97 percent of Republican officials said nothing.
Republican leaders absolutely know that the images Trump shared are racist. They are not confused. They are not misinformed. They make a calculation. And the calculation is simple: angering Trump’s supporters is more dangerous than tolerating Trump’s racism.
So they tolerate it. Again and again.
By the time you read this, the media will probably have moved on. After all, every day in the Trump administration brings a new hell and even overt racism battle to keep the public’s attention. Trump has historically been extreme in both cruelty and disregard for the political norms that once constrained even the most damaging presidents. So why am I even writing about it? Shouldn’t I just move on?
No. Because this is how normalization actually works. Not through silence, but through consequences that are so weak that they are barely noticed. A small difference of opinion. A few headlines. Some sternly worded tweets. And in this case, a rebellious president who once claimed so he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not losing voters who are actually forced to remove a racist post (after defending and trying to do it first). shift the blame to a White House aide).
And then everyone goes back to pretending that the restrictions that once limited this behavior still exist.
They don’t.
Cruelty is no longer bad politics
Take former President Ronald Reagan. In 1971 – nine years before he became president – he was taped laughing with President Richard Nixon and describing a United Nations delegation from Tanzania as “monkeys.” The comment remained hidden for decades.
The National Archives eventually released the tape in 2000, but the racist language was redacted. When the full comments were eventually released in 2019, Reagan’s daughter, Patti Daviswent to the pages of the in tears Washingtonpost to defend her father, claiming the language was an aberration rather than proof of how power actually spoke behind closed doors. (I beg to differ.)
Apparently, former presidents who used racist language were clearly forced into an apology, aloofness, or damage control. Trump usually avoids this pressure, aside from deleting a post and refusing to apologize for it.
So yes, everyone understands that portraying the Obamas as monkeys is racist. And yet only eleven Republicans in Congress could be bothered to condemn it. Trump has not lost any position in the Republican Party as a result.
That’s where the real danger lies — not in Trump’s cruelty, and not even in his disregard for rules or laws, but in the steady erosion of the political norms that once made certain behavior disqualifying for any politician, let alone the president. American institutions have now shown a willingness to consider even this level of norm violation as politically survivable.
Racist leaders make racist policies
Once brutality becomes politically feasible, the consequences are not limited to spirited internet discussions and barbs between elected officials. They migrate to policy – and ultimately to law.
For decades, civil rights law has recognized a fundamental reality: discrimination does not always announce itself with a slur or a white hood. Sometimes it appears as a ‘face-neutral’ policy– one that does not mention race at face value – which coincidentally continues to produce racially unequal outcomes. This is known in legalese as ‘disparate impact’.
The Supreme Court has established the concept of disparate impact Griggs vs. Duke Power in 1971, which challenged the legality of requiring written intelligence- and skills-based tests that effectively prevented black workers from advancing beyond low-level jobs. (Yes, there was a time when the Supreme Court acted as if it understood how racism works.)
Trump has now taken aim at that doctrine. In April 2025, he issued a executive order that tells federal agencies to stop enforcing disparate impact liability wherever possible. An executive order cannot magically erase statutes or Supreme Court precedents. But it could be a signal of how aggressively — if at all — the law will be enforced.
Along with Trump’s attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in school and the workplace –which he tried to ban in a January 2025 executive order– a pattern is starting to emerge. If Trump’s disparate impact liability policy comes to fruition, black plaintiffs — who face the kind of housing or employment discrimination that is rarely admitted out loud — will struggle to prove discriminatory intent in court.
This has obvious disadvantages for black people. And it has an added benefit for white people, because white plaintiffs can point to diversity or equality programs as corroborating evidence of intentional discrimination against them. The result is a civil rights framework turned inside out, one that makes it harder to challenge inequality and easier to justify white discontent. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies insist that this reversal is what fairness actually looks like.
This is what consequence-free racism looks like once it moves from speech to law. And it becomes harder to fight once it’s there.
Reconstruction is underway again
This is not an abstract legal debate. It’s happening now. Reconstruction-era civil rights statutes—written to guarantee black Americans the same rights as white citizens—are now being used in ways that make it easier for inequality against black Americans to continue.
Examples include legal efforts to stop programs designed to address racial exclusion, such as the successful legal challenges to that investment programs such as Fearless Fundfounded to address the historic exclusion of Black women entrepreneurs from venture capital, as well as the recent prosecution of Black journalists covering protest, such as Don Lemon.
Laws intended to dismantle white supremacy are being repurposed to police the people who continue to fall under them. Because in the United States, even the laws designed to combat white supremacy can eventually be repurposed to defend it, provided you wait long enough and hire enough lawyers.
None of this is unprecedented, of course. After Reconstruction, the Constitution technically promised equality, while Jim Crow and the KKK mocked it. American history is full of moments when rights existed on paper while disappearing everywhere else.
What feels different during Trump’s presidency isn’t necessarily the racism. It’s the shrug.
An important part of the electorate continues to reward his racist behavior. Political leaders continue to adapt to this. Media institutions continue to normalize it. And democracy continues – supposedly – to function.
Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth at the heart of all this: American democracy has always depended on voluntary restraint. About powerful people who chose not to do the worst thing they were technically allowed to do.
What the Trump era has revealed is how fragile that arrangement really is.
Because letting go of restraint and trading in overt racism no longer has any real consequences, the guardrails are not failing dramatically. They simply cease to exist. And when the guardrails are gone, the law does not remain neutral. It reorganizes itself around the new reality. If that new reality is old racism, the question is no longer whether the system is once again tilting toward white supremacy.
The question is whether there is anything left in the system that can turn it around.
Update, February 18, 2026: This article has been updated to clarify how executive orders are enforced.
#racism #longer #consequences