I have been doing a lot of reading lately, and a book that I highly recommend, especially to Americans who deny their country’s innate racism,  is The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson. The book tells the history of the migration of over six million Blacks from the Jim Crow south that took place from WW1 to 1970. While revolving primarily around three people, whose stories she renders in heartfelt detail, it is a stark reminder of the terrible prejudice, injustices, abuses and murders Black people have faced for so many years, realities that did not end with their emancipation.

All of which brings me to state the obvious: Donald Trump is a blatant, unapologetic racist who uses his Executive bully box to cultivate and inflame, not heal, the deep divisions within his country. The latest of many instances of Trump’s vile nature is perhaps one of his most shocking – the depiction of the Obamas as monkeys. It is a depiction for which, typical of his cowardly nature, he offers no apology, 

Donald Trump said on Friday evening, after a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes had been posted to his social media account and then deleted, that he had directed aides to post the offensive video but that he hadn’t seen that portion of the clip and he refused to apologize for it.

The clip appeared during one of the 79-year-old US president’s increasingly frequent late-night posting sprees to his Truth Social account, and shows the laughing faces of the former president and first lady superimposed on the bodies of primates in a jungle setting, bobbing to the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

Trump accepts no responsibility for this loud dog whistle sure to appeal to his MAGAT followers..

Although the White House initially defended the video in a statement from the press secretary, the video was later deleted and reporters were told that it had been posted, without the president’s knowledge, by an aide.

What led to the deletion? Apparently, a rare instance of a few Republicans showing a soupcon of spine as they joined with Democrats to condemn the deeply offensive post.

Tim Scott, a South Carolina senator, the only Black Republican in the US Senate and a former contender for the party’s presidential nomination , posted on X: “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”

Earlier, Mike Lawler, the Republican congressman from New York, had posted: “The President’s post is wrong and incredibly offensive – whether intentional or a mistake – and should be deleted immediately with an apology offered.”

That spine was notably absent from Senate and Congressional leadership, however.

Neither of the top two Republicans in Congress, Thune and Mike Johnson, the House speaker, offered comment, prompting Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat and the Senate minority leader, to post on X: “Racist. Vile. Abhorrent. This is dangerous and degrades our country – where are Senate Republicans?

In the Wizard of Oz, the cowardly lion finally found his courage. In this reality, however, neither the cowardly Trump nor his most ardent supporters have any desire to find theirs.