Have we become uncomfortably numb? Trump posts video of the Obamas as apes.
by Bob Schwartz
Trump shares video with racist imagery of Barack and Michelle Obama in late-night posting spree
In clip amplifying false claim that Trump won 2020 election, the Obamas’ faces are superimposed on bodies of apes
Richard Luscombe, The Guardian
Fri 6 Feb 2026
Fury erupted early on Friday after Donald Trump posted a racist video that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
The clip appeared during one of the 79-year-old US president’s increasingly frequent late-night posting sprees to his Truth Social account, and shows the laughing faces of the former president and first lady superimposed on the bodies of primates in a jungle setting, bobbing to the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
There have been American moments when your reaction is “this is not happening.” Sometimes it is the sudden shock of an assassination or of towers under attack and collapsing. Sometimes it is an extended situation, like the Covid pandemic.
The Trump presidency is both. There are particular moments that shock. There is a cumulative extended experience. Defenders may say again and again that it is just “Trump being Trump.” The rest of us wonder when we will wake up from the seeming interminable nightmare.
Have we “normalized” the aberrant, hateful, inhumane and frankly demented? Have we become uncomfortably numb, knowing what is wrong but just wanting to pull the covers over our heads and get on with our lives, compromised as they may be?
Let us wake up, not from the nightmare, but to the heart of the nightmare to actualize a better dream right now.
Bob Schwartz 
Not normalized but perhaps powerless…
Thanks for the comment.
A few months into Trump 1.0–that’s nine years ago–Arcade Fire and Mavis Staples released the track I Give You Power.
I give you power, over me
I give you power, but now I gotta be free
I give you power, but now I say
I give you power, I can take it away
I can take it away
Is it true? Did it help? Does it help now?
If the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence means anything other than ridiculous self-aggrandizing despotism, it means what the Declaration says:
“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Enforcing that consent has never been harder in America. We can and we will.