And kudos to Rep. Al Green (D-TX) for Creating a Scene at the Start of the President’s State of the Union Address.
Your humble spirit is embarrassed to be writing about such things in the year 2026, over 150 years after emancipation and 60 years since the end of Jim Crow. I don’t think many white people truly believe that Blacks are inferior, but unfortunately there are still enough ignorant racists out there who enjoy it when President Trump shares a moronic, sophomoric meme depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. And the current president will take any opportunity to boost his support among the basest of his base, the lowest of the low, the trashiest of the trash whose hatred is always ready to be mobilized for the floundering MAGA cause.
Why do these people persist in hating African Americans the way they do? As many times as I have expressed empathy for their situation (many are the unfortunate economic victims of globalization and the knowledge-based economy), I remain convinced their anger is directed at the wrong people. It’s just like the poor whites in the antebellum South where I grew up, how they emulated the wealthy planters who took the South to war using poor “common men” as fodder for their greedy, immoral cause. For whatever combination of foolhardy reasons, their animosity was more often directed at the enslaved Blacks than the slaveocracy who deprived them of opportunity and kept them in their place.
As Democratic Leader Yakeem Jeffries put it: “This disgusting video, posted by the so-called president, was done intentionally. F*ck Donald Trump and his vile, racist, and malignant behavior. This guy is an unhinged bottom feeder. President Obama and Michelle Obama are brilliant, caring, and patriotic Americans. They represent the best of this country. It’s time for John Thune, Mike Johnson, and Republicans to denounce this serial fraudster who’s sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue pretending to be the president of the United States.”
Trump’s State of the Union speech repeated the false premise that non-white immigrants inherently pose a threat to the safety of white American citizens. There is no question that thousands of unvetted people should never have been allowed across the southern border during the Biden Administration, but Trump’s insistence on portraying them all as “violent criminals” and “the worst of the worst,” coupled with his near obsession with prisons and mental institutions, is a terrible distortion that panders to the worst angels of his MAGAs’ nature — the almost primal fear of slave insurrections and the sexual threat posed by Black men. (In truth, of course, white slave owners were far more likely to violate Black women.)
These People Accept Trump’s Hyperbolic Bullshit Because it’s What They Want to Believe.
The irrational fear of Black men was perhaps most vividly depicted in the famous 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, in which an innocent young white girl is chased by a ghoulish Black man (actually a white actor covered in horrible black-face makeup) and jumps off a cliff rather than suffer the unspeakable lust of the sexually crazed beast. Back then a significant portion of the audience believed this horrible melodramatic nonsense, but over 100 years have passed and it’s scary that it still resonates with a sizeable number of MAGAs.
So, back to Trump’s base hating the wrong people for the wrong reasons (and constantly jumping off a cliff of their own making). Because Trump has failed them so badly, is making their lives worse rather than better in so many ways, he has no choice but to deflect attention to their worst vulnerabilities, their culturally baked-in hatred and fear of the many “others” of this world, most especially the barbarians at the gate of the Southern border.