Trump’s agenda is to make America white again

Donald Trump’s posting on his Truth Social account platform on February 6 of headshots of Michelle and Barack Obama superimposed on the bodies of apes drew widespread expressions of horror and disgust worldwide.

Trump was sending out a very clear message, one that was not meant to be funny. What is funny is the way those reactions suggested that this time Trump had gone too far. What reasons did anyone have to assume that even that expression of contempt for the Obamas – former resident and ‘First Lady’ that they are, was a bridge too far for Trump?

The White House claimed that the president did not see what was posted and that the posting was done by a junior staffer. Calls flowed in, however, demanding that the post be removed and that Trump apologise. The post was taken down after many hours, but Trump refused to apologise, insisting that he did not make a mistake.

What neither the White House nor Trump himself has addressed is this. Even if it were a junior staffer who posted those images on Trump’s platform without his knowing about it, what does that say about the culture that exists within Trump’s team where even constructing such images is possible, so possible that the junior staffer no doubt meant it to be offensive, racist and hurtful?

Since 2008, he challenged Barack Obama’s right to be in the White House, because according to him, Obama was born in Kenya and not in the USA. Such was the media storm and febrile politics engulfing Obama on this issue, that by 2011, he publicly produced his full form birth certificate to provide proof of his birth in Honolulu, Hawaii. Detractors remained, including Trump, creating endless racially motivated distractions.

US AND UK MIRROR

In January 2018, in a White House discussion of an immigration deal, Trump referred to Haiti and African countries as ‘sh*thole countries’, including El Salvador. ‘Why do we need more Haitians’, he asked, ‘take them out’. He asserted that the US should have more people coming from places like Norway.

Trump made his remarks almost eight years to the day since the 2010 Haiti earthquake, which killed some 223,000 people.

Diehard MAGA loyalists maintained that Trump was fighting for the American people.

It is instructive to note how the US and UK mirror each other in their ramping up of anti-blackness, promoting white supremacy and in negating the presence of black folk as an integral part of the population and one that is critical to the functioning of the society.

The claim that Trump is ‘fighting for the American people’ ignores the fact that he is doing so by reversing the gains black Americans have made in their struggle for equity and against barbaric racism.

The logic of Make America Great Again, driven by a white supremacist agenda, is to make America great again by making America white, erasing the history of black struggle and the historical fact that black folk strove not just to win their freedom and survive, but to flourish, using and creating opportunities despite systemic exclusion and denial of those opportunities.

In August 2025, Donald Trump targeted the iconic Smithsonian Institute, the umbrella organisation under which the NMAHC sits, calling it ‘Woke’ and declaring his intention to purge ‘its divisive, race-centred ideology’:

“Everything discussed is how horrible our country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been”.

All of that has a history, a now familiar history. It’s the history of the dehumanisation of the African, the history of eugenics, the history of the justification of enslavement and of chattel labour, the history of the denial of systemic state racism and the barbarism through which it manifests.

BUILD A COUNTER-NARRATIVE

Meanwhile in Britain, Nigel Farage and Reform are modelling a wannabe Reform government on Trump’s America, ICE and all, the eradication of EDI and all, the abolition of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and with it the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Sector Equality Duty, the expulsion of black folk legally resident in Britain for decades.

And in order to demonstrate to the electorate that Labour could do as good a job as Reform, Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary is hellbent on stealing a march on Farage and Reform at every turn.

In August 2025, Britain and its monarch hosted a lavish state dinner for Donald Trump at Windsor castle. By that time, Trump had enabled genocide in Gaza and the massacre of 160,000 Palestinians, of whom 20,000 were children, with 40,000 children injured and 132,000 facing death from malnutrition. 97 percent of schools had been destroyed and 94 per cent of hospitals ( Save the Children, September 2025).

Trump had entertained Netanyahu in the White House, despite the International Criminal Court issuing a warrant for his arrest on account of: ‘ (Being) allegedly responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024’.

Not only did the US ignore the ICC’s warrant, they offered to appoint lawyers to defend Netanyahu in the ICC.

Now, King Charles is planning to go to the USA to mark the 250th anniversary of the declaration of American independence. That is despite Trump’s flagrant disregard for the ICC and for international law in his exploits in the Caribbean and in Venezuela, in his insistence on taking control of Greenland, in his determination to make Canada part of the USA, in his insistence on making another Gaza out of Cuba.

That is why all those who abhor fascism, who believe in safeguarding and advancing the freedoms generations before us gave their lives to win so that we might enjoy a future free of the scourge of fascism and Jim Crow racism, and who are not in denial about the state we’re in, must work together to build a counter-narrative and to ensure that those whom the people elect do not take us down a road to social unrest and inevitable strife.

Professor Augustine John is a human rights campaigner and honorary fellow at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.