Kentucky Republicans swiftly denounced a video shared by the Hardin County GOP that depicted former president Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as apes.
Likening Blacks to apes is an old racist trope.
Republican consultant and political podcaster Tres Watson protested that the video, which was later deleted, “sends the wrong signal about the Republican Party and who we are.”
The video represents exactly who Republicans are, according to Murray State University historian Brian Clardy. “You are seeing the Republican Party of Donald Trump in its truest form.”
The video seems to fit a pattern. In a recently leaked Telegram chat, Young Republican leaders from four states called Blacks monkeys and “the watermelon people.” They “mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers,” wrote Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo in Politico. “They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.”
Several Republicans condemned the comments, but Vice President JD Vance downplayed the bigotry and scoffed at what he called “pearl clutching” over it.
“Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic, and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders,” Beeferman and Ngo also wrote, characterizing the chat as “an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.”
They added: “The private rhetoric isn’t happening in a vacuum. It comes amid a widespread coarsening of the broader political discourse and as incendiary and racially offensive tropes from the right become increasingly common in public debate. Last month, Trump posted an artificial intelligence-generated video that showed House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero beside Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose fabricated remarks were about trading free health care for immigrant votes — a false, long-running GOP trope. The sombrero meme has been widely used to mock Democrats as the government shutdown wears on.
In his 2024 campaign, Trump spread false reports of Haitian migrants eating pets and, at one of his rallies, welcomed comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage’ and joked about Black people ‘carving watermelons’ on Halloween.
Soon after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a far-right-wing activist, media personality, and Trump fan, The Guardian and The New York Times published many of his bigoted statements, a number of which were overtly racist.
Kirk, whom Trump posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, said Martin Luther King Jr. “was awful. He’s not a good person.” He also said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was “a huge mistake.”
Colmon Elridge, Kentucky Democratic Party chair, issued a statement denouncing the Hardin County Republican Party video and a recently resurfaced blog post by Calvin Leach, the GOP candidate in a Jefferson County special election in which he used crude and sexist remarks. “Here is the state of the Republican Party of Kentucky: the Hardin County GOP got caught posting a blatantly racist video and the Louisville GOP is defending a special election candidate’s demeaning, misogynistic language against women. People who compare African Americans to apes and believe the ‘vast majority’ of women have no morals do not belong in leadership positions — not in Kentucky, not anywhere.”
The Jefferson County Party chair said the county committee didn’t know about the video when they nominated Leach. But the party is evidently standing by its nominee.
Leach’s opponent in the Dec. 16 balloting is Kentucky State AFL-CIO endorsed Democrat Gary Clemons, president of United Steelworkers of America Local 1693.
Clardy is saddened by the growing bigotry in the former party of “Lincoln and Liberty,” the party responsible for “the second founding of America” in the 1860s by leading the Union to victory in the Civil War and by championing constitutional amendments that abolished slavery, made African Americans citizens, and put the ballot in the hands of Black men.
“Today, under Donald Trump, that party embraces the most virulent and rabid forms of racism and sexism,” Clardy. “But that is where we are.”
Clardy said he isn’t surprised by the race-baiting in Republican ranks. He said it started in the 1960s and 1970s, with President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” which was based on using racist code words to win over white Southern Democrats angry at their party’s embrace of civil rights activism. Ronald Reagan expanded the “Southern Strategy” nationwide. Trump has turned the GOP into the party of white supremacy, according to Clardy.
“I hate to say it, but I told you so,” he said. “We knew back in the 1970s and 1980s that Donald Trump was a notorious racist. We knew this with the Central Park Five, with his treatment of Puerto Ricans, Muslims, and immigrants. We knew this when he helped push the birtherism conspiracy against Barack Obama.
“Now that he’s gotten a second term, the gloves are off. The guardrails are gone, and there’s a lot more to come.”
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