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Texas Rep. Al Green held a sign reading "Black People Aren't Apes," protesting a racist video Trump had previously shared on Truth Social. Green was escorted out of the House chamber just minutes into President Donald Trump's State of the Union address.
This was nothing new.
Before President Donald Trump released a video on his Truth Social account earlier this month that depicted Michelle and Barack Obama as apes, many were already well aware of his compulsive use of AI-generated deepfake content to disparage the former president. Many were also well aware of his tendency to employ dehumanizing rhetoric to describe people of color.
Unfortunately, this high-level bigotry has become a normalized phenomenon in the media cycle today. But it has deep roots in history throughout Western civilization.
While no apology was issued for the video, or for any of the president’s exhaustingly frequent social media posts, this particular video was removed within hours.
Of course, the blame for this “erroneous” post was redirected to an anonymous staffer, but Trump then proceeded to post several photos of himself alongside Black celebrities. This was clearly damage control.
Across the aisle, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries decried this imagery as vile. Others suggested the message was backpedaled because he felt the tides turning.
There is precedence. Throughout history, blatant associations of race and animality have been out of bounds because they diminish the humanity of people of color. Underlying this claim is another inference that is even worse: Humanity is a quality that has long been wielded against BIPOC folks. The human, as a social concept, depends on animalization, and dehumanization is human.
The term “dehumanization” implies a process by which one’s inherent humanness is discarded, leaving behind an absent reference. Enlightenment Era thinkers from Western Europe established a narrow conceptualization of the human that was measured, above all else, by the capacity to reason.
Decolonial philosopher, essayist, poet, and scholar, Sylvia Wynter, refers to this figure as “Man,” the benchmark by which one’s full humanity could be recognized. Jamaican-born Wynter, 97, argues that Eurocentric ideas about rationality and civility were inseparable from the racial hierarchy produced by the age of exploration and colonization.
In this culture, as many have been conditioned to perceive the animal as the opposite of the human, the history of the West reveals that animality is not the opposite of humanity—but its precursor. The human is a newer (and intrinsically better) model of the animal. Dehumanization, then, aligns certain humans alongside other nonhuman animals, who are deemed to lack those humanizing qualities.
One of the reasons why so many feel deeply unsettled by racist imagery that likens people of color to nonhuman animals is because it is a cruel reminder not only of a history of violent dehumanization but also because it forces a reckoning with a continuum (from least animal to most animal) that too many still buy into.
Human superiority was entrenched in abolitionist rhetoric from the 18th and 19th centuries. Abolitionist and British surgeon Alexander Falconbridge, who recorded and published his observations from time spent in slave ships between 1782 and 1787, writes, “Nor do these unhappy beings, after they become the property of the Europeans (from whom, as a more civilized people, more humanity might naturally be expected), find their situation in the least amended.” Falconbridge appeals here to his audience’s civility, that which separates “Europeans” from the enslaved, “unhappy beings.”
During this time, Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus developed the binomial system of classification, a categorization system of living beings that codified and hierarchically distributed both race and species.
To justify these divisions, naturalists sought out differences that proved Human superiority—centered around language, art, and culture. The problem, as Amie Souza Reilly, Writer-in-Residence at Sacred Heart University and author of the 2025 book Human/ Animal: A Bestiary In Essays, writes, isn’t “just that the White European naturalists assumed only human animals can reason, or that this reason makes them superior, but that they used this line of thinking to subjugate, enslave, display, and dehumanize people were not White Europeans by aligning nonwhite, nonmale, non-Europeans with animals, therefore pushing themselves to the top of the hierarchy they invented.”
Political scientist at the University of California-Irvine Claire Jean Kim refers to race and species as two interconnected “taxonomies of power.” These taxonomies lump and split nonwhite groups according to how close to nature they are perceived.
Her examination of this satirical drawing, published during the 1867 California gubernatorial race, demonstrates how these taxonomies work not as a set system but as a context-specific methodology used to justify all kinds of oppression—chattel slavery, theft of indigenous land, exploitation of migrant labor, and even industrial slaughter.
To be clear, the point is not to invalidate the harm caused by such dehumanizing discourse present day or historically. My position is in no way aligned with those who claim that Trump’s post has been taken out of context to manufacture controversy.
Claiming ignorance and hiding behind allegory does not dismiss the harm of racialization. However, it is important to recognize that racism like this is tethered to the very core of liberal humanism.
Charles Chesnutt, a Black novelist, essayist, and activist, understood this in 1889, when he published “Dave’s Neckliss.” The short story, alongside several other “Conjure Tales,” is narrated by John, an Ohioan farmer who purchases land in and relocates to North Carolina after the Civil War.
The stories center around interactions with Uncle Julius, a Black man whose anecdotes about the slave plantation are filtered through John’s rational lens. In this story, John’s observations reveal himself to be the arbiter of what constitutes the human: “But in the simple human feeling, and still more in the undertone of sadness, which pervaded his stories, I thought I could see a spark which, fanned by favoring breezes and fed by the memories of the past, might become in his children’s children a glowing flame of sensibility, alive to every thrill of human happiness or human woe.”
Rather than a biological fact or even an essential right, the human here is a marker of one’s place in the social order, and it can be given or taken away on a whim from those marked as other.
Sen. Tim Scott (R. SC) said he could only “pray” that the racist video post was a fake, because the alternative would mean grappling not just with the president’s racism but with his unassailable power to determine—like Linnaeus, like Falconbridge, like John—the relative value of all human—and nonhuman—life.
Akash Belsare is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressing congress, December 8, 1941.
The record of the Trump 2.0 administration is one of repeated usurpations and injuries to the body politic: fundamentally at odds with the principles of democracy, without legal or ethical restraint, hostile to truth, and indifferent to human suffering. Our nation desperately needs a stout and engaging response from the party out-of-power. It’s necessary but not sufficient for Democrats to criticize Trump, rehearsing what they are against. If it is to generate renewed enthusiasm among voters, the Democratic Party must offer a compelling positive message, stating clearly what it stands for.
Fortunately, Democrats don’t need to reinvent this wheel. They can reach back to a fraught moment in our history when a president brought forward a timely and nationally unifying message, framed within a coherent, memorable, and inspiring set of ideas. In his address to Congress on Jan. 6, 1941 – a full 12 months before Pearl Harbor – Franklin Delano Roosevelt termed the international spread of fascism an “unprecedented” threat to U.S. security. He also identified dangers on the home front: powerful isolationist leanings and, in certain quarters, popular support for Nazi ideology. Calling for increased military preparation and war production (along with higher taxes), he reminded citizens “what the downfall of democratic nations [abroad] might mean to our own democracy.”
Roosevelt framed his speech by naming four “essential human freedoms,” applicable not just domestically but “everywhere in the world”:
The first are First Amendment guarantees. The last two spoke directly to a nation still emerging from the Great Depression and anxious about international turmoil. The idea that Americans could escape the stain of want and the paralysis of fear resonated across the country. The popular artist Norman Rockwell executed a series of four paintings illustrating each idea. When they appeared as covers on the Saturday Evening Post, the magazine received 25,000 requests for reprints. After we entered World War II, all four ideas served as touchstones, illuminating what we were fighting for.
Fast-forward to the present, which bears an uncanny resemblance to Roosevelt’s world. Along with a terrible disconnect: For FDR, the threats to our nation and its values overwhelmingly emanated from abroad. He could scarcely have imagined that 85 years later the menace would reside in the White House. The 32nd president would be aghast at how the 47th has, in the words of Fareed Zakaria, “declared war on civil society.” Trump has normalized criminal behavior and criminalized constitutionally protected actions – systematically undermining each of the Four Freedoms:
Democrats must not lose sight of pressing kitchen table issues and, above all, the existential threat facing our democracy. But they need to put forward a clearly drawn and detailed plan – couched in the kind of unadorned language Roosevelt used so effectively – to demonstrate how a properly functioning government can restore and extend each of these four fundamental freedoms; How a new generation of enlightened, ethical, and compassionate political leaders can repair the Trump administration’s damage through legislation and responsible governing; And finally, how this “Project 2029” can spark a rebirth of liberty, equality, and prosperity. If properly articulated, such a pledge will resonate with everyday citizens, as it did in Roosevelt’s era. The American people thirst for a forward-looking, hopeful, and elevating message to reawaken faith in our institutions and our deepest values. The scaffold is here, just waiting to be given voice.
Philip A. Glotzbach, Ph.D. is president emeritus of Skidmore College. He is the author of Embrace Your Freedom: Winning Strategies to Succeed in College and in Life, a book of guidance for college students and their parents in these troubled times.
Beau Breslin, Ph.D. holds the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair in Government at Skidmore College.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks alongside Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick (C) and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer (R) during a press briefing held at the White House February 20, 2026 in Washington, DC.
I came of age, politically speaking, during the presidency of one of the two most polarizing figures in our recent history. I am aging out during the presidency of the second one.
Richard Nixon and Donald Trump rose to power in markedly different ways but suffered remarkably similar falls from public grace while they were in office. Whatever demons and character flaws may have driven them to wield power as they did obviously played a part in their rise and fall, but they are irrelevant to the central point of this essay.
As presidents, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump made singular and unheralded contributions to the practice of democracy and the way we think of ourselves as Americans, not for their accomplishments while in office but for how a great number of everyday Americans stopped them from pulling off whatever they had in mind to realize their grander ambitions.
Others and I have written about the long and bumpy process whereby societies become more democratic. That is, how more well-to-do, socially prominent, and powerful people cede bits and pieces of what it means to be more and better than the rest of us to more of us than they would have preferred or thought feasible.
The great challenge in effecting such a change is how to pull it off without people retreating, as Tocqueville put it, to the temporary and illusory comfort provided by people in their small private circles, or, even worse, from tearing apart the social and economic order from which more of us today than in the past take a measure of comfort and security.
A complete handover or switch in of who was more on top and who was more in the middle or at the bottom was never finished or even in the cultural cards with which we are playing. There was more dealing from the bottom of the deck and more cards being slipped from sleeves than was agreeable or probably necessary to keep the game going. But over a period of time measured more in centuries than decades, and with more people being able to play, we all learned how to read the table better, call each other’s bluffs, and on occasion, force the dealer to reshuffle the cards to ensure the deck wasn’t as stacked against the rest of us as we had come to believe.
It’s the calling of bluffs and forced reshuffling of the decks that concern me here, how less experienced and accomplished players stopped more deck stacking, surprising sleights of hand, having their pockets picked, and, importantly, how the card sharks had their teeth pulled.
I understand that much of our present concern about the future of our democracy is driven by how Donald Trump behaves, the unwillingness or inability of other elected officials to call him to task for what he says and does, and his continuing appeal to tens of millions of American voters because he says and does these things.
But what sank Richard Nixon’s presidency and is sinking Trump’s is how a great many more Americans who pay middling-to-little attention to politics or how the federal government is supposed to work have called Trump’s bluff.
There is nothing selfless about their intervention. But more than selfishness is in play and at risk when so many Americans stand up and put a loud, disruptive, not infrequently destructive, and increasingly less-than-deadly-face to their unwillingness to be governed as their leaders were insisting.
These are acts of social and political disconsent that rebuke and chastise our governors for their obnoxious behavior and unwanted intrusion into our lives.
Here is how political disconsent works and why it succeeds.
Acts of disconsent do not last a long time. (They don’t have to for their intended message to be delivered or accepted.)
Acts of disconsent are neither designed nor intended to overturn whatever government was responsible for having behaved in an untoward or extreme way. (All the protesting and demonstratively annoying people on the street are happy to return to their otherwise humdrum lives once the offending practices are ended and the people executing them are sent packing.)
Angry disconsenters today are likely to memorialize their displeasure in future elections. (They are less likely than in the past to burn down the house of the offending official or obnoxious neighbor or run them out of town.)
Today’s disconsent has effectively brought Donald Trump’s reign to an end, but probably not his presidency.
He’ll find another ring to add to his circus performance and somebody else to eat in public.
But President Trump is also prone to bellowing loudly and expressing righteous anger and much made-up rage when whoever is on his plate puts up a big stink and bites back.
Minnesotans bit back. Young people and not-so-young people all over the country are biting back.
That’s why President Trump declared a moratorium on bagging and deporting the Spanish-speaking brown people who "sneaked" into the United States.
By my count, this leaves only his cabinet and people in Canada, Greenland, Cuba, Venezuela, NATO, and Ukraine to chew on and spit out.
There’s a midterm election coming.
My money’s on Canada, Greenland, Cuba, Venezuela, NATO, and Ukraine.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany.
Marco Rubio is the only adult left in the room
Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address.
I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.
But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.
Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President JD Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of their case.
So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it but also its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.
In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
I agree with some of this — to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.
But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions — like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice — are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?
This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.
There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9% bigger than ours. In 2025 we were nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off,” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector, where we are a behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer.
That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.
I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.