Trump doesn’t invent resentments — he senses which ones are newly safe to express

There is a particular kind of ugliness that does not merely offend but instructs. It tells us something about who we have been, who we are becoming, and what social permissions are quietly being expanded. Donald Trump’s circulation of an image portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes belongs squarely in that category. It is not a one-off lapse. It is a signal flare.

This was not just racist imagery; it was historically literate racism. The ape trope is among the oldest tools in the dehumanization kit, refined over centuries and deployed whenever Black Americans have come too close to full belonging. One does not stumble into it by accident.

To understand why this matters — and why it is likely to get worse — we have to situate Trump not just as a provocateur, but as a product of moral inheritance, cultural permission, and a long American tradition of racial degradation repackaged as “joking” or “provocation.”

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Trump has always been less an ideologue than an accelerant. He doesn’t invent resentments; he senses which ones are newly safe to express. His strategy, if we must call it that, is social intuition — an ability to intuit when cruelty will be rewarded rather than punished.

That intuition was honed in a family and business culture that Mary Trump, his niece, describes in her 2020 memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, as emotionally brutal, hierarchical, and relentlessly contemptuous of perceived weakness. Empathy was treated as a liability; dominance as virtue.

That worldview maps neatly onto racial hierarchy. When Trump rose to political prominence by falsely claiming Barack Obama was not really American, he was not engaging in policy disagreement. He was policing the boundaries of belonging. The ape image is simply that instinct stripped of euphemism.

It is also not untethered from history. Trump’s defenders bristle at any mention of white supremacist lineage, but history is stubborn. His father, Fred Trump, was arrested at a 1927 Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens — an event Trump has long dismissed without serious reckoning.

Whether Fred Trump was a member or merely present is ultimately less important than what this moment symbolizes: Trumpism did not emerge in a vacuum. It grew in soil long fertilized by segregationist politics, racial grievance, and coded contempt that later became uncoded.

Cultural historians like Henry Louis Gates Jr. have shown how the ape trope was central to 19th and early 20th-century pseudoscience, minstrel culture, and colonial propaganda. To depict Black people as simian was to deny them reason, morality, and ultimately rights. It was a way of making cruelty feel natural.

Scholars from Frantz Fanon to Saidiya Hartman have traced how this imagery did not vanish with Jim Crow; it merely went underground, resurfacing whenever racial hierarchy felt threatened.

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The Obama presidency was precisely such a moment. For some Americans, it symbolized not progress but displacement. Trump rose by giving voice to that panic, laundering it through grievance and mockery. The ape image is not regression; it is escalation.

Why will it get worse? Because norms erode asymmetrically. Once a president can circulate imagery that would once have ended a public career — and suffer no meaningful consequence — the floor drops out. What was once unsayable becomes debatable. What was once debatable becomes funny. And what was once funny becomes policy.

What made this episode briefly arresting — before it slid into the familiar churn of outrage — was that condemnation came, at least initially, from both sides of the political aisle. Democrats responded with predictable fury, naming the image for what it was: racist, dehumanizing, indecent. But some Republicans, too, recoiled. A handful of conservative commentators, former officials, and religious leaders expressed a kind of moral embarrassment, as if they had suddenly overheard a family secret spoken aloud at the dinner table.

That bipartisan outrage matters, but not in the way we might hope. It did not signal a renewed moral consensus so much as a fleeting recognition of how far the ground has shifted.

Many of the Republican critics framed their objections narrowly — not that the image was wrong in itself, but that it was “unhelpful,” “distracting,” or “beneath the dignity of the office.” This is the language of procedural discomfort, not moral revulsion. It suggests that the line being defended is not the humanity of the Obamas but the decorum of politics.

On the Democratic side, the outrage was morally clearer but strategically fatigued. There was anger, yes — but also weariness. A sense that we have seen this movie before, named its villain, issued our statements, and then moved on. Moral clarity without moral consequence eventually becomes ritual. It reassures the speaker more than it restrains the offender.

In a healthier moral ecosystem, bipartisan outrage would be a stopping force.

This asymmetry reveals something crucial. Outrage alone does not halt degradation; it can even normalize it by making it routine. When every transgression is met with the same crescendo of denunciation and the same absence of consequence, the culture learns a quiet lesson: that cruelty is survivable, that it carries no lasting cost. Trump understands this intuitively. He relies on the fact that outrage is loud but short-lived, while the permissions he expands are durable.

What we witnessed, then, was not a national reckoning, but a brief moral spasm — a reminder that many Americans still know, at least intellectually, that some lines should not be crossed. The tragedy is that knowing is no longer the same as enforcing. In a healthier moral ecosystem, bipartisan outrage would be a stopping force. In ours, it is often just a speed bump.

Trump’s political project has never been about persuasion in the classical sense. It is about habituation. Repetition dulls outrage. Shock exhausts resistance. Eventually, people stop asking whether something is wrong and start asking whether it “works.”

This is how democracies corrode — not in grand coups, but in the slow reeducation of moral reflexes. The danger is not only Trump’s blatant racism and cruelty, but the lesson it teaches: that dignity is conditional, and that some people may always be safely reduced.

If history teaches us anything, it is that dehumanization does not stop where it starts. Once a society relearns how to sneer, it rarely remembers where to stop.

And that is why this moment deserves more than disgust. It deserves memory.

Jack Hill is a diversity consultant, child advocate, journalist, and writer.