To fully understand Donald Trump’s use of a racist trope—depicting the Obamas as apes—requires more than outrage or dismissal. It requires both a historical and psychological lens. We should not look away. Moments like this are not aberrations; they are windows into the racial contours of America.

European encounters with Africa long predated the North Atlantic slave trade, and the early record reveals a complicated mixture of fascination, respect, fear, and emerging hierarchy. Medieval Europe knew Africa not only through trade and diplomacy but through the presence of African Muslims in Iberia during the centuries of Moorish rule. African figures also appeared in European religious imagery, most notably in the veneration of the Black Madonnas, which suggested spiritual reverence rather than contempt. At the same time, European literature reflected anxiety about difference. In William Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor is noble yet marked as racially other—admired, feared, and ultimately isolated. These cultural artifacts reveal that European perceptions of Africans were not initially fixed but were evolving toward racialization.

With the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, moral ambiguity gave way to ideological necessity. The massive commerce in human beings demanded justification. A central question—debated by theologians, merchants, and political authorities—was whether Africans were fully human or, at minimum, inherently inferior. Religious authorities wrestled with the issue, but economic interests prevailed. Dehumanization became the moral foundation of a system built on the buying and selling of human bodies.

In the Americas, the stakes intensified. Slavery became the economic engine of colonial and early national development, particularly in what became the United States. The profitability of plantation agriculture tied national prosperity to racial bondage. As historians such as Edward Baptist and Sven Beckert have documented, American capitalism itself was deeply entangled with slave labor. The greater the economic dependence, the stronger the ideological need to portray the enslaved as naturally suited to servitude.

The daily reality of slavery produced a paradoxical intimacy. White enslavers exercised absolute domination—through violence, surveillance, and legal subjugation—while also engaging in sexual exploitation that produced generations of mixed-race children. The system required psychological distance even amid physical proximity.

During his nineteenth-century travels, Alexis de Tocqueville captured this dynamic. Observing American race relations, he wrote in Democracy in America that the white population had “degraded the Negro, and then makes his degradation a reason for keeping him in bondage.” The insight remains powerful. Oppression creates the very conditions later cited as proof of inferiority. Dehumanization becomes both cause and justification.

As slavery gave way to emancipation, the ideology did not disappear; it adapted. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “scientific racism” measured skulls, ranked races, and later deployed intelligence testing to claim biological hierarchy. These claims were presented as objective science but functioned as intellectual cover for white supremacy—a pattern that echoes today in periodic efforts to revive genetic or IQ-based racial arguments.

Modern genetics has dismantled the biological foundations of racial hierarchy. DNA research demonstrates that all humans share overwhelming genetic similarity and belong to a single species, Homo sapiens. Race, as biology, collapsed under scientific scrutiny. Yet ideas outlive evidence. Cultural images—from minstrel caricatures and “coon” stereotypes to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—kept the association of Blackness with primitiveness embedded in American consciousness.

Politicians long exploited these racial currents. In the twentieth-century South, figures like George Wallace openly mobilized white resentment to maintain political power and resist Black equality. Northern politicians often relied on coded appeals rather than overt race-baiting.

Donald Trump represents a significant development: a national, northern political figure who recognized the electoral power of racialized grievance and used it openly. His record is extensive. Federal authorities sued Trump and his father in the 1970s for housing discrimination against Black tenants. He took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty in the Central Park Five case—after the young men were later exonerated. He launched his political ascent by promoting the false claim that President Obama was not born in the United States. He referred to African nations as “shithole countries,” described immigrants and suspects as “animals,” and repeatedly framed Black protest movements as threats rather than grievances.

Against this backdrop, the circulation of imagery depicting the Obamas as apes is neither random nor trivial. The ape comparison is one of the oldest dehumanizing tropes in Western racial history, rooted in efforts to place Africans closer to animals than to Europeans. Whether deployed intentionally or casually, such imagery carries historical weight.

Strategically, these signals function as political communication. They reassure segments of a political base that the speaker shares their resentments and cultural assumptions. Psychologically, they serve another function: the assertion of dominance. It is ironic, that Trump chose the Obamas, whose achievements contradict narratives of racial inferiority, and who are both superior in education, temperament and public service.

We should end where we began. We should not look away. Trump’s imagery operates like a national Rorschach test. It reveals less about the Obamas than about the viewers—and the society interpreting it.

When we encounter such images, what do we see? Folly and cruelty? Or something more troubling: the persistence of a centuries-old habit of mind?

The answer tells us not only who Donald Trump is. It tells us who we are.