3 months ago, KY GOP rejected a racist meme. When Trump does it, silence | Opinion
It seems like three years ago, but it was just three months ago when Hardin County Republican Party Chair Bobbie Coleman apologized for posting an AI meme depicting the Obamas as apes.
The reaction was swift and definitive. Coleman apologized, and the Republican Party of Kentucky opened an investigation.
“The Republican Party of Kentucky condemns hate in all its forms,” Chairman Robert Benvenuti said in a statement. “The post is vile and reprehensible, and is directly adverse to all that we stand for as a party and a nation. We are actively investigating the matter and will take the harshest action available to us against those involved. We remain committed to the values of Lincoln and advancing liberty and prosperity for every American.”
Then on Thursday evening, President Donald’s Truth Social account posted the exact same meme on Truth Social. It was spliced near the end of a nearly minute-long video rant about the 2020 election.
RPK spokesman Adam Hope said he could not speak on behalf of the White House, but it looked like it might have been included by accident.
“It doesn’t seem like it was the President’s intention to post that video,” Hope said. “On our end, we handled situation the best we saw fit.”
They did, and they handled it the right way. But now they are silent on the Trump White House. To be sure, it would be a full-time job to repudiate the racism and white supremacy oozing out of this administration on a daily basis, which delights in posting Nazi-themed hints and suggestions everywhere from X to their own podiums.
“The memes will continue,” vowed a White House spokeswoman after the White House was caught digitally altering the face of a Minneapolis activist to make it look like she was crying.
Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt at first dismissed questions about the post as fake outrage, but by midday, it was taken down, and an anonymous staffer was blamed for the mistake.
Depicting Black people as monkeys is a racist trope as old as our country’s slave trade, used by segregationists and racists to make their victims less than human.
So what are local Republicans going to do? The Three Stooges running harder for Trump’s endorsement than the U.S. Senate seat itself certainly aren’t going to be as brave as Benvenuti was last year.
I asked Republican leadership of both the state House and Senate for a comment, as well as the Barr, Cameron and Morris campaigns. More silence thus far.
As for Trump, he’s long been obsessed with former President Barack Obama, demanding to see his birth certificate for years before he really went wacko after Obama actually won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump understands the zeitgeist of the U.S. better than anyone, and realized that others were as outraged by our first Black president as he was. He tapped into a larger theme at work: the right-wing insistence that America did too much to right the wrongs of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, and we need a correction that can only be made through racist tropes and propaganda, like attempting to deny our real history at every turn.
As for me, I agree with writer Adam Serwer, who coined the phrase “the cruelty is the point,” about the first Trump administration, who posted on Bluesky Friday morning.
“Pour one out for every professional political pundit, writer, consultant whatever that has spent the last decade trying to pretend that the Trump phenomenon was about trade or opiates and not a big chunk of white america losing its mind over having a black president,” he wrote. “The entire anti wokeness nonsense of the past decade was about making this kind of gutter racism broadly acceptable again.”
This story was originally published February 6, 2026 at 12:52 PM.
