The Big Lie was always a racist project

Trump's racist video had two parts: a Big Lie rehash and a Jim Crow cartoon. They’re not separate stories.

Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman in Congress (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Journalism must say what needs to be said, omitting no crucial context.

Donald Trump’s failed attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election always rested on the proposition that votes in a handful of diverse and Black-majority U.S. cities were suspect or illegitimate.

In a now-deleted social media post, Trump turned that subtext into text by sharing a video rehashing his election lies and then depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The White House defended Trump’s post before deleting the video amid public backlash.

The Jim Crow depiction of the Obamas came in the last few seconds of the 62-second video, set to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

Coverage of the video focused on the overt racism of the video’s final moments, either ignoring the election lies that preceded the ending or treating it as an unrelated detail.

That ignores crucial context: Racism was always the lifeblood of Trump’s Big Lie.

‘The worst abuses in our nation’s history’

The NAACP recognized that in a lawsuit against Trump for violating the Ku Klux Klan Act, writing this when filing the lawsuit in late 2020:

“Defendants’ efforts to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters—targeting cities with large Black populations, including Detroit, Michigan, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Atlanta, Georgia—repeat the worst abuses in our nation’s history, where Black Americans were denied a voice in American democracy for most of the first two centuries of the Republic.”

Passed in the Reconstruction era, the KKK Act aimed to protect the civil rights of formerly enslaved people. At least five lawsuits accused Trump of violating it in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and three have survived dismissal. (One was voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiffs.)

Former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election subversion indictment against Trump ended with a criminal conspiracy against rights charge under the Klan Act.

The final words of the indictment stated that Trump “did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States — that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.”

‘Like vials of heroin or cocaine’

Sometimes, the racism embedded in Trump’s election subversion strategy was subtle, but other times it was not. Trump’s lawsuit aiming to topple the election results in Wisconsin sought to invalidate the vote totals in precisely two diverse counties: Milwaukee and Dane.

That’s why Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Jill Karofsky told Trump’s then-lawyer Jim Troupis during oral arguments that his lawsuit “smacks of racism.”

Rudy Giuliani’s campaign to vilify and terrorize Georgia election workers Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and Ruby Freeman rested upon racist stereotypes, including by falsely accusing them of passing each other USB drives “like vials of heroin or cocaine.”

During emotional testimony before Congress, Moss revealed that she actually handed her mother a ginger mint, and she described being bombarded by “a lot of threats,” including death threats.

One of the threats Moss described included an explicit reference to lynching: “Telling me that I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’”

During Giuliani’s trial, Moss told a jury that she was worried that the people sending the threats would “hang me and my mom.”

A jury ultimately awarded Moss and Freeman a $148 million verdict, which a judge reduced to $146 million. Giuliani later reached a settlement with the mother and daughter whom he smeared.

The New York Times admirably avoided euphemisms in reporting on the now-deleted social media posts. Two of the headlines accurately reported “Trump Deletes Post with Racist Video of Obamas After Outcry” and “Trump Administration’s Social Media Posts Echo White Supremacist Messaging.” The Times treated the subject matter with more realism, objectivity and bravery than other outlets, but all of the major papers treated the Big Lie content of the video as either secondary to or separate from the Jim Crow cartoon in the final moments.

If the video shows anything, it’s that the racist undercurrents of Trump’s election lies must no longer get a pass.