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Donald Trump posted a video online depicting the Obamas as apes.

This isn’t shocking—or at least it shouldn’t be. Trump has built an entire political career out of saying the quiet racist part out loud and then daring the country to do something about it.

From housing discrimination in the 1970s and the Central Park Five ads to birtherism and comments about “shithole countries,” the man has been running the same racist playbook for decades. This is the same man who told congresswomen of color to go back where they came from and warned that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. At this point, treating any of this as shocking requires a kind of practiced amnesia.

Depicting the first Black president and first lady as apes is racist, dehumanizing, and offensive in ways that aren’t exactly subtle or remotely original. 

Still, the current president of the United States sharing this video matters—even if he ultimately deleted it.

And what happened next matters more.

Where’s the pushback?

This latest episode, which occurred in the first week of February, is not just another entry in America’s long, ugly scrapbook of anti-Black dehumanization. It’s a stress test—a very simple one, really, of how much open anti-Black cruelty American institutions can sustain while still pretending this is a democracy.

History suggests the answer is “quite a lot.”

To be fair, a handful of Republicans objected to Trump’s racist AI slop. Eleven Republican members of Congress by my count, managed to locate both their conscience and a microphone. Some of them even managed to say the word “racist,” which in modern Republican politics is akin to setting yourself on fire. 

But here’s the problem: Nothing happened next. Nothing changed.

As with so many past examples of outrageously deviant behavior by the chief executive, this moment was brushed aside as simply another example of Trump being Trump—filed away as background noise rather than as a political event with political consequences.

But the relevant question after Trump posted the offensive video was never whether a few people could locate their conscience for long enough to issue a press release. The real question was whether any of it would produce consequences that meaningfully altered Trump’s standing inside the GOP.

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The mainstream media behaved as if a few Republicans who........

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