GOP backlash against Trump’s racist post is all about politics

There is, it turns out, a line — however faint and grudgingly acknowledged — that even Donald Trump’s brand of racist, dehumanizing rhetoric cannot cross.

That line was apparently breached last week when a video posted to Trump’s Truth Social account depicted former U.S. president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as jungle primates.

The clip was swiftly condemned, not just by Democrats and civil rights leaders, but by a notable number of Republicans as well. Within hours, it was deleted, although Trump refused to apologize for it.

Progress? Hardly. The bar was so low it was practically subterranean. If anyone was tempted to believe this episode signalled a newfound restraint, Trump quickly disabused them of that notion with a racist rant over the weekend aimed at Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny.

Trump took to Truth Social to denounce Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show as “absolutely terrible,” sneering that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” The performance, he said, didn’t meet “our standards” and was “an affront to the Greatness of America.”

Translation: it wasn’t English enough or not white enough or both.

Bad Bunny — born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — is one of the biggest music stars on the planet. He is also an American citizen from Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory whose residents have been citizens for more than a century.

Spanish is his first language, spoken by more than 40 million Americans at home — making it, by far, the most common language in the United States after English.

None of that mattered to Trump.

What did matter, as it so often does with him, was that Bad Bunny is a vocal critic of the Trump administration.

Just days earlier, as he accepted a Grammy Award, Bad Bunny declared “ICE out,” a blunt rebuke of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that has become synonymous with Trump’s violent and sometimes deadly mass deportation agenda.

Bad Bunny delivered a vibrant, celebratory halftime performance steeped in Latin culture. It featured a real wedding, appearances by Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin, and a closing message in English: “God bless America,” followed by the names of countries across North and South America.

Holding a football emblazoned with the words “Together, We Are America,” he added in Spanish, “We’re still here.”

It was a spectacular performance.

But not to Trump. His message is consistent: some Americans are more American than others, and those who don’t conform linguistically, culturally or racially to his narrow, racist worldview are suspect, or worse.

That same logic underpins the Obama video controversy. That post surfaced during the first week of Black History Month.

The video was vile. At the end of a clip promoting baseless claims of election fraud, Obama and his wife appeared as primates, their smiling faces superimposed onto animals in a jungle scene. The White House initially dismissed the backlash as “fake outrage,” but later blamed a staffer for the post.

Trump told reporters he “liked the beginning” and hadn’t noticed the racist ending. When pressed, he claimed to condemn racism — even as he insisted he’d done nothing wrong.

Republican senators, including Tim Scott of South Carolina — the Senate’s lone Black Republican — called the post “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said it was “totally unacceptable” and demanded an apology. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called it “utterly despicable.”

The episode raises an obvious question: why did this particular incident finally trigger pushback from Trump’s own side?

The answer may lie less in moral awakening than in political calculation. Trump is vulnerable on multiple fronts — from economic anxiety to renewed scrutiny of the Jeffrey Epstein files — and Republicans who are facing tough re-elections may have decided that publicly swallowing overt racism has become a liability rather than a loyalty test.

Yes, the Obama video was taken down. That is something. But it is also the bare minimum — a reluctant acknowledgment that there are, at last, some limits to what even Trump can get away with.

What the Bad Bunny episode makes clear is how narrow those limits remain. It’s OK to demean immigrants, mock other languages, suggest American culture belongs to one group and one group only, as well as belittle other countries and attack their sovereignty. Apparently, those are all still fair game for Trump.

Removing a single racist post does not erase a climate that produced it, or a presidency that continues to thrive on racism, grievance, division and exclusion.

It is, in a word, revolting.

» Tom Brodbeck is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist.