Trump's Racist Video: "No, I didn't make a mistake."

Our books have discussed Trump's low character, which was on display this week.

Erica L. Green, Isabella Kwai and Zolan Kanno-Youngs at NYT:

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.

Still, Mr. Trump offered no contrition when pressed. “No, I didn’t make a mistake,” he said.

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.

 

House Minority Leader HAKEEM JEFFRIES has posted a new new video about the Trump video from Truth Social. Here is what the top House Dem said:

"This disgusting video, posted by the so-called president, was done intentionally.

"Fuck Donald Trump and his vile, racist and…

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) February 6, 2026

Trump Disses Christians and Posts Racist Video

Our books have discussed Trump's low character, which was on display this week.

David Gilmour at Mediaite:

President Donald Trump shared a 2020 election conspiracy video to Truth Social on Thursday night that briefly depicts former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes.

The 62-second video, shared at 11:44 p.m. ET, is largely focused on pushing a conspiracy about manipulated vote-counting machines that projected former President Joe Biden would win states like Georgia. But an AI clip spliced into the end of the video shows the faces of the Obamas superimposed on apes’ bodies for roughly a second, accompanied by The Tokens’ song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

The clip carries a watermark linked to a pro-Trump account on X with tens of thousands of followers.

 

The Big Lie,  California ed.:

Trump, on Newsmax, claims the recall election in California is "probably rigged" (as if Democrats can't win elections there fair and square) pic.twitter.com/gPbSq0XHGN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 8, 2021

Investigations

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection. 

Some say that we should not establish a 1/6 commission because it would overlap with other investigations.  That consideration has not stopped Congress in the past, as Philip Bump notes at WP:

Bonkers at Mar-a-Lago

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.

Aaron Blake at WP:

As The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reported Sunday, Trump’s speech reserved the heaviest and newest criticisms for the man who is currently the most powerful Republican in Washington, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). Trump hit McConnell for not helping overturn the 2020 election and called him a “dumb son of a b----,” while accusing him of being ungrateful for Trump’s appointment of McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, to his Cabinet.

Audio of the speech reviewed by The Post reveals that Trump at times went even further in going after his foes and revising electoral history, even lodging a suggestive attack involving former first lady Michelle Obama’s appearance.

Below are some key quotes from the speech.

McConnell wasn’t the only one Trump called an ingrate. That was also the verdict for another Republican who declined to toe Trump’s line on the legitimacy of the 2020 election and whom Trump has gone after before: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.

But in prosecuting that grievance, Trump made a somewhat uncharacteristic comment about Michelle Obama — of whom he has often steered clear — while also using her husband’s middle name in a suggestive way.

“Oprah Winfrey camped out in Atlanta” in support of Kemp’s 2018 opponent Stacey Abrams, Trump claimed, wrongly saying that Winfrey was there for “months.”

Trump added: “Barack Hussein Obama and the very beautiful Michelle Obama were there for … ”

At this point, the audience laughed uproariously. Michelle Obama’s appearance has often served as a punchline in some portions of the conservative Internet.

“ … they were there for — forever,” Trump concluded.

Trump has a history of disparaging the appearances of women he doesn’t like. It was also an odd attack for another reason: Michelle Obama didn’t actually campaign for Abrams.

...

Trump will often oversell his crowds — his presidency began on that note — but even by those standards, his comments Saturday were amazing.

Trump claimed that the rally he addressed on Jan. 6 before the storming of the Capitol was the largest he had ever spoken to, despite estimates putting the crowd in the thousands.

“There was a rally for — however you want to define it — at the Capitol,” Trump said. “It was the largest crowd that I’d ever spoken to before. Some people say it was over a million people. It was tremendous.”

...

Speaking of ways in which Trump echoed the launch of his political career: He began his 2016 campaign by stating that rapists and murderers were coming across the southern border. And Saturday, with a border crisis emerging early on his successor’s watch, he rekindled that language.

“They’re not sending their best people,” Trump said. “You have murderers. You have rapists. You have drug dealers. You have people that they don’t want because that’s common sense, but that’s the way it is. Many of the people that are coming up are people that those countries don’t want.”

It was remarkably similar to the language Trump used in 2015.

ACB and ACA

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the health care issue in the 2016 campaign.  the 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.  As we explain, loss aversion made Obamacare a liability for Democrats at the time of its passage: voters worried about losing health benefits that they already had.  But by 2018, the roles had reversed.  Obamacare was now the status quo, and the GOP was threatening to take it away.  The issue now strongly favors the Democrats.

Gregory Krieg at CNN:

Democrats on Saturday night launched their case against federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, saying support for her confirmation was equivalent to a vote to end the Affordable Care Act.

In a rush of statements following Barrett's Rose Garden introduction, top Democrats put the fate of the law -- and its popular protections for patients with pre-existing conditions -- front and center. They also made frequent reference to the coronavirus pandemic, and the chaos that could arise from stripping health insurance options from millions of Americans in its midst.

From the Democratic presidential ticket on down, criticism of Barrett repeatedly circled back to what has been a political winner for the party: health care -- and the backlash to Republican efforts to dismantle the ACA, former President Barack Obama's signature policy achievement.

And Trump walked right into it:

Obamacare will be replaced with a MUCH better, and FAR cheaper, alternative if it is terminated in the Supreme Court. Would be a big WIN for the USA!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2020

So did Senator Mike Lee:

For all the talk of Dems needing to watch what they're saying, Mike Lee is likely to feature in a Dem campaign ad. https://t.co/jXXMZd1XrV

— Drew Savicki (@SenhorRaposa) September 27, 2020

"He Paid With His Life" "It Is What It Is"

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.  

This show, this longest political TV ad ever, isn’t designed for the junkies but for people who dip in for 10 minutes before going back to Netflix. And that’s smart. #DemocraticConvention

— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) August 18, 2020

Mike Allen at Axios

On opening night of their awkward but stirring virtual convention, Democrats prioritized racial justice along with the pandemic and the recession.

• Why it matters: On issues, Joe Biden's widest margin over President Trump in a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll is race relations — a 24 point spread.

....

Trump's handling of the virus animated the night's top zinger — from Kristin Urquiza, who wrote a viral obituary for her father, Mark Urquiza of Arizona:

• "My dad was a healthy 65-year-old. His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump — and for that he paid with his life."

Michelle Obama owned the night, and used a line from President Trump’s "Axios on HBO" interview as a rapier: "[H]e is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is."

• 'Those five words — down from her seven-word catchphrase at the 2016 convention, "When they go low, we go high" — have become a cultural shorthand for Trump's handling of the virus.

The former first lady encouraged viewers to "request mail-in ballots tonight," and urged them to be prepared for chaos at polls:

 

Obama, Biden, and Fundraising

In Defying the Odds, we discuss campaign finance and campaign technology. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

Daniel Chaitin at The Washington Examiner:

Joe Biden appears to have pulled a fast one on the Trump reelection campaign with his fundraising event Tuesday evening with former President Barack Obama.

The Trump team quickly took to mocking Biden after the vice president said he raised a "remarkable" $7.6 million in the virtual fundraiser, noting that the Republican cause hauled in $10 million over the weekend of President Trump's rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

"The fact that he touted this fundraising event so grandly, and then hid it from view, is just more proof that Joe Biden can’t withstand the scrutiny of the American people as he runs for president," Tim Murtaugh, Trump 2020 communications director, said in a triumphant press release, referring to reports of limited press access.

But Biden's campaign later revised that figure, saying the fundraiser pulled in $11 million in total

The Biden campaign appears to have gamed the Trump campaign by releasing an early fundraising number for the Obama event today, getting the Trump campaign to claim Trump “eclipsed” Obama on recent fundraising, and then releasing a full and bigger number for Obama’s

— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) June 24, 2020

The Social Media Gap

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.  

Read this morning's Technology 202 newsletter for the latest updates on Twitter's "manipulated media" flag. Facebook has now also labeled Dan Scavino's post of the edited video: https://t.co/IpgKIJ8Xr1

— Cat Zakrzewski (@Cat_Zakrzewski) March 9, 2020

Jim Rutenberg and Matthew Rosenberg at NY Times:

The doctored video didn’t originate with one of the extremist sites that trade in left-bashing disinformation. It was posted on Twitter by Mr. Trump’s own social media director. From there, it collected shares, retweets and likes from the social media accounts of the president, his eldest son and the multitudinous conservative influencers and websites that carry his message to voters’ palms hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second.

The video, based on a speech Mr. Biden gave earlier this month, registered five million views in a day before his campaign responded — with statements to the press and cable interviews that largely focused on persuading Facebook to follow the example of Twitter, which had labeled the content “manipulated media.” A direct social media counterattack, aides said later, would have risked spreading the damage.

Yet the Biden camp would have been hard-pressed to mount a proportional response had it tried: Mr. Biden has only 4.6 million Twitter followers to Mr. Trump’s 75 million, 1.7 million Facebook fans to Mr. Trump’s 28 million, and nothing resembling the president’s robust ecosystem of amplifying accounts.

...
Part of the Democrats’ technological degradation could be attributed to brain drain. Many of Mr. Obama’s 2012 digital operatives found jobs in Silicon Valley or started their own companies.

But in interviews, Democrats also argued that Mr. Obama had not adequately worked to rebuild the party for his successors. After 2012, he started his own competing political operation, Organizing for Action, and Democrats complained he was slow to share his valuable data and email lists.

“Obama effectively left the party alone for eight years,” said Mr. Dean, a former Democratic Party chairman, adding that such neglect was not uncommon among second-term presidents.

Mr. Obama has acknowledged failing “to rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level,” as he told ABC in 2017, explaining that he had been focused on presidential responsibilities at a time of war and economic recovery.

The article goes on with detail about the GOP's more effective use of partisan outside groups.

Buttigieg Out

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under way.

Elena Schneider at Politico:

Soon after midnight on Sunday morning, Pete Buttigieg convened his senior advisers on a conference call. Sitting in a car after flying to Georgia from his last rally in Raleigh, N.C., Buttigieg told them the campaign was over.

Buttigieg’s staff had just briefed top donors two days earlier about his plans to push forward in the presidential race, looking deep into the March primary calendar for friendly Midwestern states. But in the hours between those two calls, Buttigieg’s disappointing fourth-place finish in South Carolina’s primary — and Joe Biden’s stronger-than-expected win there — squeezed the delegate math of the 2020 race.

The narrow path forward the candidate saw days earlier had all but disappeared, and he knew it, according to a senior Buttigieg source who described his thinking. “The turning point was South Carolina,” said another person close to the Buttigieg campaign.

Reid Epstein and Trip Gabriel at NYT:

On a conference call with campaign donors on Sunday evening, Mr. Buttigieg said he had reached the decision with regret but concluded it was “the right thing to do, when we looked at the math,” according to one person on the call. Without mentioning opponents by name, Mr. Buttigieg said he was concerned about the impact he would have on the race by staying in, saying Democrats needed to field “the right kind of nominee” against Mr. Trump.

Mr. Buttigieg talked with Mr. Biden and former President Barack Obama on Sunday night, according to a Democratic official familiar with the conversations. Mr. Biden asked for Mr. Buttigieg’s support and the former mayor indicated he would consider the request. Mr. Buttigieg wants to sleep on the decision, he told aides, some of whom believe he should move quickly to endorse Mr. Biden.

Mr. Obama did not specifically encourage Mr. Buttigieg to endorse Mr. Biden, said the official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations. But Mr. Obama did note that Mr. Buttigieg has considerable leverage at the moment and should think about how best to use it. Should Mr. Buttigieg endorse Mr. Biden on Monday, it could reshape the Democratic primary if many of his supporters shift to Mr. Biden, creating a more formidable centrist challenge to Mr. Sanders’s progressive movement.

In his remarks, Mr. Buttigieg directed criticism toward Mr. Sanders, without naming him, that he has previously made on the debate stage and on the campaign trail.

“We need leadership to heal a divided nation, not drive us further apart,” he said. “We need a broad based agenda to truly deliver for the American people, not one that gets lost in ideology. We need an approach strong enough not only to win the White House, but hold the House, win the Senate and send Mitch McConnell into retirement.”

Americans Think Obama Did Better on Iran

In Defying the Odds, we discuss foreign policy issues in the 2016 campaign. Our update takes the story through the 2018 election.

Andrew Romano reports on a Yahoo/YouGov poll:

Conducted from Jan. 8 to 10 — after Iranian ballistic missiles struck Iraqi bases in retaliation without causing American casualties and Trump declared that “Iran appears to be standing down” — the poll found that 42 percent of Americans opposed Trump’s approach to Iran (versus 36 percent who supported it). Forty percent said Trump was wrong to withdraw from the Obama administration’s nuclear treaty with Tehran (versus 35 percent who said he was right), while 41 percent said Trump has been less effective on Iran than Obama (versus 34 percent who said the current president has been more effective). On all three questions, about a quarter of respondents said they were either not sure or neutral.

Iranamuck

In Defying the Odds,we discuss Trump's approach to governing. The update --recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

Aaron Blake at WP:

The United States killed a top-level Iranian military leader in Iraq early Friday local time, and the questions on everyone’s mind are: Are we now at war? What happens next? And what is President Trump prepared to do?

The decision to take out the powerful military commander, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, was a huge one. Reporting suggests he is indispensable to Iran-backed forces across the Middle East, and the move will be seen as a remarkable escalation of tensions between Iran and the United States — even after supporters of an Iranian-backed militia stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad this week. Iran has responded to the Trump administration’s pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and implementing heavy sanctions with increasing provocations, and Trump has now lodged a major response.

The president repeatedly predicted years ago that his predecessor would attack Iran in order to get re-elected. pic.twitter.com/9zGciVOCjy

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) January 3, 2020

One more: pic.twitter.com/erKCOejsQU

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) January 3, 2020

Hail Caesar

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's place in the American constitutional system. 

Lloyd Green at The Guardian:

A shutdown averted, a constitutional crisis born. On Friday, Donald Trump declared a national emergency to gain additional funds for his much promised border wall, bypassing Congress and raiding the Pentagon for $3.6bn, already a legally dubious proposition in the eyes of the justice department. So much for Mexico paying.
Once upon a time, Trump and his legal minions brayed against unilateral executive actions, calling them tyrannical. Not any more. Barack Obama is out of the White House.

Hail Caesar, hello his praetorian.

Take Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal lawyer. In April 2016, in a brief to the supreme court attacking Obama’s unilateral expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, Sekulow painted Obama as a despot.

Echoing James Madison, founding father and fourth president, Sekulow thundered that the “accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny”. He also compared Obama and his executive order to Harry Truman’s unconstitutional seizure of America’s steel mills during the Korean war.

According to Sekulow, Truman “violated controlling precedent and abdicated [his] constitutional duty to faithfully execute the law”.

In other words, by expanding Daca without a congressional green light, Obama had committed an impeachable offense.

 Justice Robert Jackson Concurring opinion, Youngstown v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (June 2, 1952)"

When the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb, for then he can rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter. Courts can sustain exclusive presidential control in such a case only by disabling the Congress from acting upon the subject. [Footnote 4/4] Presidential claim to a power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution, for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system.