‘Dead to him’: Donald Trump privately rages at Republicans who called out racist video of the Obamas
US President Donald Trump has reportedly been raging, in private, at the politicians from his party who dared to criticise a racist video posted on his social media account a week ago, and is accusing them of disloyalty.
The video, which the White House now claims was published by an unnamed staffer – on the President’s personal account, in the middle of the night, amid a flurry of other posts – featured one minute of an outlandish conspiracy theory from the 2020 election.
Mr Trump still does not accept that he lost to Joe Biden, and posts about it frequently.
At the end of the clip, for just a couple of seconds, an image of former president Barack Obama and his wife Michelle flashed up.
The faces of the first black president and first lady were superimposed on the bodies of apes, evoking a racist trope with a long, well-known history.
The Trump White House initially defended the post, saying the clip of the Obamas was but one part of a longer video portraying prominent Democrats as characters from The Lion King. There are no apes in The Lion King, though the background music to the clip was The Lion Sleeps Tonight. It dismissed outrage over the video as fake.
Within a few hours, the story changed, and the White House was blaming a staffer for posting the video without Mr Trump’s knowledge. That person, if they exist, has not been identified.
Speaking to reporters this week, Mr Trump said he had not disciplined the unnamed staffer. He did not take responsibility for the post, and he has not apologised to the Obamas.
“I didn’t make a mistake,” Mr Trump insisted.
If you care – and heck, even if you don’t, I’m the one spending my Saturday night writing about this – my theory here is that Mr Trump’s algorithm served him the clip of the Obamas as suggested content after the election denial video, he didn’t realise he was posting it, and then reflexively went into his usual “never apologise for anything” stance.
That is probably the most innocent explanation available to us, unless you buy the “a staffer did it” excuse. It would, however, raise some unsettling questions about the President’s social media habits, if his algorithm thought he would enjoy such a thing.
The backflip in the White House’s messaging came in part because multiple Republicans, in a rare example of pushback against the President, had publicly criticised him.
One of them, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, is the party’s only African-American senator.
Another, Alabama Senator Katie Britt, is seen as something of a rising star in Mr Trump’s party, and was chosen to deliver the official rebuttal to one of Mr Biden’s State of the Union speeches.
There were other Republicans who slammed the post, but Mr Trump is reportedly furious at those two in particular.
“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it,” Mr Scott wrote on social media after seeing the post.
His phrasing – “the most racist thing” – raised a few eyebrows, as it implied there had been other racist things too.
A little later, after the post had been deleted, Ms Britt said “it should never have been posted to begin with” and it was “not who we are as a nation”.
CNN reported, today, on Mr Trump’s private fury, citing senior administration officials, who were not named.
“The President felt he could have handled that matter privately,” one of the network’s sources said of Mr Scott.
“He was like, ‘We work together all the time. He didn’t need to comment publicly.’”
The senator did reportedly reach out to Mr Trump privately before speaking publicly, but couldn’t get through to him.
The President apparently felt Mr Scott’s comments are what “made the entire story blow up”.
Mr Trump was even angrier at Ms Britt. He “used expletives to denounce her” and declared “that she was dead to him”.
Speaking on air, CNN reporter Alayna Treene said the President had “used a lot of expletives, I was told, when talking about her lack of loyalty”.
“So very, very much anger from the President,” she added.
For what it’s worth, Ms Britt’s office has called the report “fake news” in a statement emphasising that she has a “100 per cent” record of voting in line with Mr Trump’s wishes. The White House praised her as “an incredible ally”.
