Trump’s sharing of a racist video of the Obamas on Truth Social is beyond the pale, even for him

The late Maya Angelou had a saying that goes, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”

She’s gone now, but that was some really good advice.

I am reminded of the late author’s wisdom after watching and rewatching a blatantly racist video that President Donald Trump posted on Thursday on Truth Social. It includes AI-generated imagery depicting former President Barack Obama and his wife as dancing primates.

I am so disgusted.

Anything to make the Obamas look bad. I wish I could share a photo of it with this column, but it’s too offensive. I’d tell you to go see his Truth Social account and look it up yourself, but I learned while writing this column that he has taken it down.

Trump’s boorishness is no surprise. He has been showing us who he is and what MAGA is about since even before he came down that escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 and called Mexicans rapists and drug dealers.

So it’s entirely fitting that night he would reshare a video repeating false claims about the 2020 presidential election, which he lost, that includes vile imagery about the 44th president.

For many of 44’s supporters, the Obamas represented America at its best. And no matter where one stands politically, it would be hard to argue that Obama himself ever succumbed to the kind of impulsivity, rudeness, and disrespect we regularly see these days out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

But Trump is a petty, vindictive man whose obsession with the Obamas goes way back. It began in 2011, when Trump deliberately started a campaign of lies about Obama, claiming he wasn’t born in America and therefore ineligible to occupy the Oval Office.

Some pundits argue that Trump’s Obama envy helped fuel his own run for the presidency. And now that he is in the White House for a second term, you’d think he’d be over it. But judging from the way he keeps disparaging Obama, he’s not.

Trump is furious that Obama was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and he was not — even after relentlessly promoting himself for one. That’s why when Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado offered to give him her Nobel medal, he accepted it despite the Nobel committee’s clarification that possession of the medal alone is meaningless.

Trump also ordered the installation of plaques under the photos of his presidential predecessors, and used the one under Obama’s to bash his legacy, calling him “one of the most divisive political figures in American history” and making other false claims.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to walk Trump’s post back, writing, “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King.”

She added via text, “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

There’s nothing fake about our outrage. We see Trump. We know what he’s doing by pulling out that old racist trope. Even Black Trump supporters like Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) see this for what it is. “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it,” Scott wrote on social media.

Perhaps Scott has a really short memory and has forgotten Trump’s executive orders banning diversity, equity, and inclusion, and his calling Somali Americans “garbage” and African nations “shithole countries.”

Maybe Scott also doesn’t recall how Trump administration officials ordered the dismantling of the exhibit about the nine enslaved Africans the nation’s first president held in bondage at Sixth and Market Streets. Same thing with how Trump has ordered the renaming of military bases after the Confederate traitors they once honored.

To him I say, “Brother, get woke.”

This is part of a pattern. Trump has been letting us know exactly who he is and what his administration is all about for a long time now.

MAGA supporters make excuses for his conduct, but when someone shows you who they are, believe them. Maybe they’ll get it now.