Author: Solomon Jones

When Donald Trump posted a meme on his social media platform that portrayed former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, as apes, it was an act of racism.

Trump engaging in this behavior during Black History Month is no accident. His childish attempt to taint the legacy of America’s most accomplished Black couple is about more than insulting the Obamas. It is meant to demean all of us.

After all, if a Black president is nothing more than a monkey, a Black doctor, lawyer, or executive is even less than that. Therefore, in the minds of those who embrace that kind of racist reasoning, Black history should not be celebrated. It should be mocked, undermined, and erased.

That’s why we can’t ignore the timing of Trump’s decision to pry Black history from the walls at the President’s House slavery memorial at Sixth and Market.

We must not downplay his sudden fixation with controlling the voting apparatus in cities like Philadelphia with large Black populations.

We cannot pretend that portraying the Obamas as monkeys is isolated from his ongoing attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Trump has chosen to use the 100th anniversary of Black History Month to send a message: It is now open season on Black people.

The White House, through a statement from press secretary Karoline Leavitt, initially sought to downplay the president’s social media post. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King,” Leavitt said. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

But here’s the thing. The president’s racist post does matter to the American public, as evidenced by the immediate backlash from major figures on both sides of the aisle. Even Black Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, who normally declines to criticize the president’s racial broadsides, responded.

“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it,” Scott wrote on social media.

Scott, who chairs the Senate Republicans’ midterm campaign arm, is right to pray, because with each outrageous act by the president, Republican odds in the upcoming elections get a little longer.

But Trump’s overtly racist post was never about the elections. It was about reshaping the society in which we live.

Though Trump deleted the post after Americans reacted with outrage, the message was sent. Black people are the enemy, and they are to be treated as such.

As if to underline that point, a white listener called my radio show on Friday morning and called me the N-word on the air. I was neither surprised nor angry. Rather, I experienced a moment of great clarity. America should, too.

Trump is inviting the white conservatives who comprise much of his political base to follow his lead and embrace racism. He is reaching back for vile racist tropes to get them to do so.

In some ways, I’m grateful Trump waited until Black History Month to do this. History, after all, is a strong and determined teacher. We must strive to be the kind of students who embrace history’s lessons.

In 1906, for example, the determination to portray Black people as monkeys took an unimaginably cruel turn. A young African named Ota Benga, who had been taken from what was then the Belgian Congo, was placed in a cage at the Bronx Zoo with actual monkeys. Historians speculate he may have been 12 or 13 — caged with monkeys so crowds of white people could gawk at him, laugh at him, demean and humiliate him.

Benga was freed when outraged Black ministers and others complained about his treatment. Ten years later, Benga killed himself, and the Wildlife Conservation Society, which oversees the Bronx Zoo, spent nearly a century trying to cover up what was done to him. It was only after the murder of George Floyd that the organization fully acknowledged and apologized for the incident.

History teaches us that when racism is left unchecked and unchallenged, people die.

This Black History Month, as Trump seeks to take us backward, he must know that we will not go quietly.

In fact, we will not go at all.

I don’t believe the Trump administration removed the slavery memorial at the President’s House at Sixth and Market Streets to protect the reputations of the dead. I believe they did it to crush the spirits of the living.

Perhaps, for those too demoralized by Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, the instinct to resist has faded. But Trump doesn’t know Philadelphians. We are a stubborn sort, reared in well-worn streets that are older than America itself. You cannot take crowbars to our history and pry it from the walls. Nor can you silence us when we rise up to tell the story of what you’ve done.

That’s why Friday’s arrest of Don Lemon, a journalist who toiled in Philadelphia before moving to the national stage, will only sharpen the focus on the Trump administration’s push to deport Black and brown immigrants. It’s why the arrest of Georgia Fort, a vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists, which has its roots in Philadelphia, will only shed light on this administration’s troubling strain of anti-Blackness.

Pretending that Lemon and Fort committed a crime by covering a protest in a mostly white Minnesota church is ludicrous. Yet, that’s what the Trump administration would have us believe. They want us to think that reporting on protesters who were seeking to confront a pastor said to have ties to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a criminal act. That interviewing people is enough to be charged with conspiracy against the rights of religious freedom and an attempt to injure while exercising religious freedom.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who oversees the Civil Rights Division of Trump’s Justice Department, claimed the protesters were “desecrating a house of worship and interfering with Christian worshipers.” Yet, the Trump administration, just days ago, declared that it would send federal agents into churches and schools to arrest undocumented immigrants. Does that also desecrate a house of worship? Or is it only sacrilege when others do the same thing?

Don’t bother to try to make sense of it. You can’t, because the Trump administration is not seeking fairness. Nor is it seeking truth. Instead, it is attempting to reshape reality in the image of Donald Trump.

I doubt that it’ll succeed, because there’s a strange thing about truth. No matter what you do to it, truth does not cease to exist. It simply waits to be uncovered.

Prying Black history from the walls at Sixth and Market Streets will never erase truth. Instead, the truth will be amplified. Not only by Michael Coard and the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, the activists fighting to preserve our history. This truth will be told by all of us.

George Washington enslaved nine Africans in Philadelphia. He returned them to Virginia nearly every six months, thus avoiding the requirement to free them under Pennsylvania law. One of the enslaved, Oney Judge, managed to escape from Washington and his wife, and America’s first president spent years trying to return her to slavery.

That is the truth of what happened here in Philadelphia, and on Friday, when I went to the site of the exhibit and saw the rusted, glue-stained frames that once held depictions of that history, I was angry. But the tale of the President’s House is not the only truth the Trump administration is trying to obscure.

By sanctioning the presence of a masked gang of federal agents in cities run by Democrats and telling those agents they have absolute immunity, Trump’s administration has made us unsafe.

Shootings by federal immigration agents in Minnesota cost Renee Good and Alex Pretti their lives. We know their names and mourn their deaths, not just because they were American citizens, but also because they were white. However, they aren’t the only ones to fall victim to the violence linked to the president’s anti-immigrant push.

In total, at least four people have been killed and eight others wounded by gunfire during immigration enforcement operations since Trump returned to office a year ago. Most of the other victims appear to be people of color. But when state-sanctioned violence hides behind the darkness of masks, the only thing that can expose it is light.

Journalism is that light, and quite often, when journalists begin to look for one truth, another is exposed. That’s what happened when Don Lemon and Georgia Fort walked into that mostly white church to report on a protest in St. Paul, Minn.

Lemon and Fort discovered that in America, where history is pried from walls and Black journalists are arrested, truth does not play out in color. Too often, it’s in Black and White.

The shooting death of Renee Good by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis will likely spark the kind of outrage that we witnessed after the murder of George Floyd.

Not just because Good — a 37-year-old wife and mother — was a U.S. citizen whose shooting by a federal agent was captured on several videos. Not even because those videos indicate that the government’s initial account of the shooting is false. Good’s death will trigger outrage because she was a white woman, and in America, the lives of white women are valued more than most.

It’s haunting, really. Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent about a mile from where Floyd was killed by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin in 2020. Video of both incidents circled the world in seconds. And while Good was a white woman and Floyd was a Black man, the role of race hangs ominously over both incidents.

Floyd was a victim of the disproportionate police violence leveled against Black people, and Good — a white woman — was a casualty of Donald Trump’s war on Black and brown immigrants.

The confrontation that killed Good occurred after the Trump administration sent more than 2,000 federal agents and officers to Minnesota as part of a large enforcement operation targeting Somali immigrants. The surge of federal agents, which took place on the heels of fraud allegations leveled at Somalis, was met with protests.

Good, who was in a maroon Honda near one such protest, was approached by ICE agents in other vehicles. An agent walked up to her vehicle, pulled her door handle, and yelled, “Get the f— out of the car!”

Good first tried to back up, and then drove forward, veering around an ICE officer who shot into the vehicle. Good died from her injuries.

Trump claimed Good caused the shooting because she tried to “run over” the ICE agent, according to the New York Times.

Kristi Noem, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, claimed the ICE agent shot Good in self-defense after Good tried to commit an “act of domestic terrorism.” A Homeland Security spokesperson went further, accusing Good of trying to use her vehicle as a weapon to kill the agent. Noem even called Good an anti-ICE rioter, which makes no sense, since it would be difficult to riot from inside a stationary vehicle.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was having none of it. He called the claims of self-defense “bullshit,” and demanded that ICE get out of Minneapolis.

“We’ve dreaded this moment since the early stages of this ICE presence in Minneapolis,” Frey said during a news conference. “Not only is this a concern that we’ve had internally, we’ve been talking about it. They are not here to cause safety in this city. What they are doing is not to provide safety in America. What they are doing is causing chaos and distrust.”

Just as importantly, the death of a white woman at the hands of ICE is bringing clarity. This heartbreaking shooting lets us know that no one is exempt from the violence this administration is apparently willing to unleash to uphold its anti-immigrant policies.

I have no doubt Good’s death will be extensively covered, because police shootings of white women are rare. In fact, the Washington Post database of police shootings indicates that between 2015 and 2024, white women comprised less than 1% of police shooting victims each year.

Still, there’s more to it than that. White women in America are valued, and when they go missing or are victimized, media attention is so overwhelming that social scientists use a specific term to describe it: Missing White Woman Syndrome.

With that in mind, here is the ugly truth: America’s racial hierarchy will assuredly seek justice for Good. And while I hate that she senselessly lost her life at the hands of her government, and was demonized by the president and his cabinet members, I am nonetheless hopeful for change.

If this brutal incident wakes Americans to the danger of this moment, Renee Good did not lose her life in vain.

As I reach for the hope of 2026, I am convinced that this new year is about more than the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and more than the politics of the upcoming midterm elections. This new year is a mirror that allows us to look back on who we were in 2025.

Domestically, last year was marked by Donald Trump’s attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), his targeting of Black and Latino immigrants, his attempts to use lawsuits, threats, and bullying to silence journalists, and his sneering dismissal of the millions of people who took to the streets in protest.

Internationally, 2025 was defined by the Trump administration’s military attacks in and around oil-rich countries like Venezuela and Nigeria, an apparent push to annex mineral-rich Greenland, and Trump-backed peace deals in Gaza and Ukraine that never quite seemed to bring peace.

Taken together, Trump’s domestic and international policies hark back to a time when the United States sought to openly oppress racial and political minorities at home, while engaging in patterns of imperialism abroad.

Perhaps, in Trump’s mind, that’s what it means to Make America Great Again. In 2026, the country will have to decide if we agree with him, and the choice will not be easy, because the sides are completely dug in.

For millions of Americans, there’s an inherent appeal to Trump’s brand of no-holds-barred politics.

His supporters believe political correctness has robbed them of the right to say what they feel, to take what they want, and to run through anyone who stands in their way.

When Trump insults those who don’t look or think like him, his supporters believe he’s speaking for them.

After all, the idea of blaming others for their problems is not only palatable, it’s delicious — because when someone else is always at fault, one never has to look at oneself.

For millions of other Americans, like me, the echoes of white supremacy that amplify the MAGA movement are repulsive.

We are concerned when President Trump calls Somali immigrants “garbage,” because perhaps Somalis aren’t the only Black people he views that way.

We are horrified by the sight of Vice President JD Vance standing before white conservatives — and rapper Nicki Minaj — and uttering the words, “You don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”

We are bracing ourselves for the moment when Trump’s followers move from insults to action, because after Trump pardoned those convicted for their roles in the political violence of Jan. 6, 2021, they could very well come back for more.

That’s why in 2026, we must move swiftly to save democracy, because Trump has moved swiftly to tear it down. Don’t believe it? Let’s review.

In 2025, armed with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said Trump was immune from prosecution for official acts, the president signed scores of executive orders, knowing they’d be challenged in federal court. He also knew he could quickly move key cases to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, where the 6-3 conservative majority gave him a puncher’s chance to win.

By implementing that strategy, the Trump White House won 21 victories in the Supreme Court. The wins allowed the Trump administration to take wide-ranging actions, including: deporting undocumented immigrants to third-party countries, ending federal funding for DEI, firing thousands of federal workers without congressional approval, accessing Americans’ Social Security data, and revoking the power of federal judges to implement nationwide injunctions.

In one of the administration’s few losses, the Supreme Court recently ruled against Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Chicago.

Perhaps the ruling will stop the president’s strategy of sending troops into cities run by Democrats, or maybe he’ll find a workaround. If I were a betting man, I’d take the odds on the latter.

That’s why in 2026, if we truly want to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the birth of American democracy, we cannot stand by and watch as our country is twisted into knots.

When this year’s midterm elections take place, we must raise our voices and vote.