Barack and Michelle Obama are not alone in deserving the apology that Donald Trump will not give.
The Obamas were the objects of his breathtakingly vile video post depicting them as apes — an insult to all decent Americans.
Once again, Trump disgraced the nation’s highest office. He implied that he takes us to be as vulgar and racist as he is. To be sure, there are many people like that, and he caters to their bigotry.
That’s not who we are, but it is who Trump is.
The government had to sue Trump and his father twice to make them obey the fair housing law and rent to Black tenants in New York. He promoted the lie that Obama was not born in the U.S. He defended Nazi thugs at Charlottesville, Va. He accused Haitians of eating dogs and cats in Ohio.
He rails against “shithole” countries — meaning Black ones like Somalia — and allows asylum applications only from white South Africans. He has erased references to slavery and racism from national parks and monuments and attempts to erase diversity everywhere else, where it’s not his business.
‘The most racist thing’
It’s hard to believe that Trump didn’t know what was in the video he says he passed to an aide to post on his social media. But even if he’s being truthful for once, his problem is that the video stayed up for 12 hours before the White House, complaining of “fake outrage,” read the room, heard the outrage from his fellow Republicans, and took it down.
It was encouraging to hear Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who’s Black, denounce the video as “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” Not the first — the most.
There should have been many more (we can’t hear you, Rick Scott, Ashley Moody, Ron DeSantis, James Uthmeier, Byron Donalds and others). By their silence, they tacitly admitted they would rather tolerate Trump’s gross indecency than lose support from a president who does not deserve theirs.
“Hundreds if not thousands of people responded to the clip with enthusiasm,” The Atlantic reported. Within 12 hours, a memecoin $APEBAMA was minted, with $4 million worth traded.
“Cartoons circulated during the Civil War were printed with images similar to the one Trump posted,” the magazine said.
Our endemic racism
Nothing so flagrantly racist has come from the White House since Woodrow Wilson watched and is said to have praised the silent film, “Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and depicted ex-slaves as brutes.
The video’s apparent creator was the same person responsible for a previous clip that shows Trump dropping excrement on protesters.
The Obama clip visualized one of the oldest and ugliest tropes of racism in the world. Deeply rooted in European culture, it underlay how American enslavers rationalized treating human chattel worse than livestock.
“This belief, that Black people were not merely enslaved but a slave race, is the root of the endemic racism we cannot purge from this nation to this day,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times’ “The 1619 Project.”
It is entirely in character that Trump refuses to apologize. His inability to admit wrongdoing is one of many deep voids in his character that are so profoundly inappropriate to holding the presidency.
He is also jealous, envious, abusive, boorish, power-mad, venal, lecherous, lacking in empathy and so full of himself that he demands to have his name on everything, including, most recently New York City’s Pennsylvania Station.
Why name anything for him?
Is this really the man whose name should forever be attached to Palm Beach International Airport?
Ever since George Washington, the American people have tended to see the White House as a national shrine and to idealize its occupants as larger than life. We often expect too much of them — they too are human.
Yet it’s safe to say that most presidents have tried better than Trump to deserve the job and live up to it.
“Leadership, to me, means duty, honor and country,” George H.W. Bush said. “It means character and it means listening from time to time.”
”If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope,” Barack Obama said.
A president can act to earn respect, as they did.
Trump is the first to willfully cultivate derision and disgust. It is curious that a man so conscious of his own image seems so heedless of how he’ll be remembered.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, send us an email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.