Trump’s Obama and Bad Bunny posts crystallize his political philosophy | Sidney Blumenthal

Maga is a recapitulation of the dark side of American history that cohered into nativist nationalism a century agoDonald Trump’s posting of a video depicting former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes was the most overtly racist act of a president since Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal civil service – or since Trump’s previous racist gesture. The racist imagery Trump posted was so egregious that the video’s misogyny representing Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as animals was overlooked. Trump’s denigration of women is implicitly assumed as business-as-usual and not newsworthy: “” And down the memory hole are the 3m long-suppressed documents from the Epstein files in which he is mentioned in its unredacted pages “”, according to the Democratic representative Jamie Raskin, who was permitted access.The only Black Republican US senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina, said of the Obama portrayal: “It’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” though Scott did not disclose any list, which could have been drawn from an encyclopedia of offenses beginning Trump’s birther campaign. During Trump’s first administration, in 2020, Scott chose to call out one incident as “”: Trump’s tweet of a video of a supporter chanting “white power”. Trump’s latest racist post was preceded on 11 January by his predictable vandalism of Black History Month in an with the New York Times with a remark about the Civil Rights Act of 1964: “White people were very badly treated.”Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: , and . He is a Guardian US columnist