Racist Blame Game

Donald Trump is a lying racist

An editor of one of my client newspapers is pretty conservative. He operates several newspapers and runs my work cause quite frankly, he thinks I'm very good at what I do. He runs one other cartoonist, and it's not a liberal. That other cartoonist is Branco, who is more of a propagandist than a political cartoonist. Today, that editor has been arguing nonstop on Facebook, defending Donald Trump's racist post from late Thursday night.

On Thursday night, Donald Trump posted a roughly minute-long video focused on false election fraud claims about the 2020 presidential election, but at the end, it suddenly flashed to a clip of the Obamas’ faces superimposed on the heads of cartoon apes as the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight by The Tokens played in the background.

At first, the White House defended the post. Karoline Leavitt argued that the media needed to focus on real news and not so much on the President of the United States sharing racist videos on social media late at night. She said, “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

Democrats, activists, members of the media, and others were calling for Donald Trump to remove the video and apologize. The White House didn't care.

Then, Republicans started calling them out for this, and all of a sudden, the White House cared. How racist does something have to be to force Republicans to acknowledge it’s racist?

The Senate’s lone Black Republican, Tim Scott of South Carolina, called on Trump to take down the post. “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” That’s saying a lot because we've seen a lot of racist shit come out of this White House.

Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi called the post “totally unacceptable” and said Trump should apologize.

Around noon on Friday, Trump removed the video from his social media account, and when asked later if he condemned it, he said he did, but he refused to apologize for it. Instead, he blamed an unknown staffer for posting the racist video. We've heard this excuse before.

Now back to the editor eating and shitting out the White House talking point about this being done by an unknown staffer. He argues that nobody can prove that Donald Trump posted the video. OK, I'll play along.

This was Donald Trump's social media account. It didn't belong to anyone else. We've heard this excuse before, and just like the last time and the time before that, they refused to name who the staffer was, and there were no immediate firings from the White House.

Trump claims he only saw the beginning of the video, and no one caught the racist bit at the end. Just how amateurish is this White House? There is no excuse for that kind of sloppiness, if you are buying the argument that this was unintended.

If they realized just how wrong and racist this video was, why did they wait until noon on Friday to remove it? It seems like you would be moved to remove it before there was a backlash. Did you really need someone to tell you that it was racist to put Barack and Michelle Obama's heads on apes’ bodies?

If this really was a staffer who posted the racist video to Trump's social media account, why were they doing it after 11 PM? If Donald Trump is not the only person posting to his social media account, then why doesn't the White House become more transparent, as it claims it is, and tell us the names of everyone posting racist and lying memes to Donald Trump's social media account?

His editor says that we can't prove that Donald Trump shared this racist video on a social media account. Sure, but this isn't the first time they have done this. It's also not the first racist video, meme, or comment that we have heard from Donald Trump.

It was not a staffer who spread the racist lie that President Obama was born in Kenya. It was not a staffer who said Mexico was sending us rapists and murderers. It was not a staffer who complained about immigrants from “shithole” countries, and that he only wanted immigrants from white countries like Norway. It was not a staffer who said “send them back” in reference to Black American women. It was not a staffer who emulated Hitler and said immigrants were poisoning the blood of our country.

Donald Trump did not care that this video was racist. He probably couldn't detect the racism of putting Black people's heads on apes’ bodies until after several hours of people telling him it was racist. How many MAGAts are going to scream at me tonight and tomorrow that the video wasn't racist at all?

Donald Trump is a racist. He has always been a racist. He began his 2016 campaign with racism. His entire identity is racism, and it’s how he appeals to White voters, by telling them to be afraid of people who don't look like them. How much proof do you need to be convinced that Donald Trump is a racist? If you're not convinced by now that Donald Trump is a racist, then you are racist, too.

That, or you are extremely stupid.

Creative note: This was my first stab at it, but I thought Trump was looking a little bit too much like Oogie Boogie.

This is one where I didn't worry about the stink lines and flies scaring off editors from publishing it. They're not going to publish this one anyway. This sort of imagery scares off editors and publishers.

Drawn in 30 seconds.

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