Donald Trump has many obsessions, as we know: his ballroom, his arch, his Reflecting Pool, his retribution campaign. Well, you get the idea.
But he has three obsessions that never sleep. That’s not meant as a pun because when he doesn’t sleep, his obsessions with trashing the old Air Force One, trashing the Obamas, and demeaning people of color don’t rest either.
On Sunday last week, all three collided in a single horrid Truth Social post. Buried inside that one sickening post is a contradiction Trump apparently doesn’t see, or doesn’t care about.
Here’s what happened. Days after his maiden flight on the new Air Force One, the $400 million Boeing 747 gifted to the United States... err... Trump... by Qatar and repainted, at Trump’s insistence, from its historic Kennedy-era blue into the loathsome Trump brand colors, Trump posted an AI-generated image of Barack and Michelle Obama boarding the old plane.
In the doctored image, the aircraft is covered in graffiti: “BLM.” “Yes We Can.” And an Arabic phrase meaning “Praise be to God.” I’ve used the words horrid and sickening, but they don’t do this piece of meme garbage justice.
Anyone who pays attention knows this isn’t a one-off. It’s the latest example in a years-long pattern of blatant racist trash aimed at demeaning the Obamas, who are far more popular, more beloved, and more respected than the gruesome Trump could ever hope to be.
In February, Trump posted, then deleted after he was forced to, an image comparing the Obamas to primates. Last month, he shared a doctored photo of the Obama Presidential Library with garbage piled on top of it. If you ask me, it was a metaphor for all the garbage Trump posts.
This demented degenerate can’t fathom the fact that Barack Obama is a better man, husband, father, president, human being, and leader. Trump has zero, none, nothing in terms of redeeming qualities.
The graffiti, using “BLM” and Arabic script as racist shorthand, is menacing, disorderly, and obscene. But there’s a second layer to this story: the sheer hypocrisy of the messenger.
Trump’s beloved, and illegally obtained, new plane exists because a Gulf Muslim monarchy handed it to him. Qatar is a Muslim nation, an Arabic-speaking nation, and it bought Trump’s affection with a flying palace. He accepted it happily, repainted it in his own colors, and boarded it like an arrogant, pretentious snob.
Yet when Trump wants to make the Obamas look foreign, dirty, dangerous, and illegitimate, he reaches for that same cultural signifier, Arabic script, and turns it into an expression of blistering bigotry.
He’s not at all uncomfortable with Muslim nations. He’s comfortable with them as patrons. As gift-givers. As grift accomplices. As sources of gold-plated jets, gold lacquer, trinkets, and glittering towers bearing his name.
What Trump is not comfortable with is Islam showing up anywhere near his political enemies, or in American classrooms, or, for that matter, in American society, without being twisted into something menacing.
Trump can’t say Barack Obama’s name without shoehorning in his middle name, Hussein, as an insult, and he did it again just last week. He was reading a children’s book on Second Lady Usha Vance’s podcast, riffing that “Barack Hussein Obama” probably wasn’t much of a basketball player.
He’s been using this crap since the birther days, trying to remind people that a Black president’s middle name sounds foreign to him.
And on Monday, mere hours before posting the graffiti meme, Trump reposted a video of Black Muslim kindergartners in hijabs celebrating their graduation, their faces fully visible, with a caption lifted straight from a right-wing account: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”
The replies and comments from his vomit-inducing MAGA xenophobes were filled with calls to deport five-year-olds and ban a religious garment worn by children.
So yes, it’s a little about his feelings toward what he considers an inferior Air Force One. But in the end, it’s not really about Air Force One. It’s not really about the Obamas. And it’s not really about hijabs in a Minnesota kindergarten.
It’s about who Trump believes is allowed to look legitimate, and who he believes deserves to be marked, mocked, and degraded. A monarchy with billions to spend on him gets a handshake from his bruised and bloated hand. A former First Family and five-year-old girls in a school photo get turned into permission slips for his followers’ worst, most insidious instincts of racist rants.
Trump landed in Turkey on Tuesday, a Muslim-majority NATO ally, aboard the very plane he can’t stop bragging about. The irony will almost certainly be lost on him. It shouldn’t be lost on the rest of us.
Trump is a racist pig who will never match Obama’s character or stature, and who doesn’t mind harming innocent Muslim children.