There was a time, not so long ago, when Donald Trump filed a lawsuit over a joke.
The joke? That he resembled an orangutan.
On Real Time with Bill Maher, host Bill Maher in 2013 repeatedly juxtaposed Trump’s orange-tinted face and infamously unruly hair with images of an orangutan. The meme was crude, juvenile, and undeniably effective. It stung. So much so that Trump reportedly threatened legal action, claiming defamation over the suggestion that he might be the “spawn” of an orangutan.
Pause there.
Years later, the same man who could not stomach a late-night joke now governs with a politics of division. Trump’s hypersensitivity to animal comparison exposes something essential about him: he understands the power of dehumanization. He knows it wounds. He knows it delegitimizes.
So when he used this same tactic earlier this month against former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama — “re-Truthing” a social media post depicting them as monkeys — it was not accidental. It was strategic.
Trump’s strategic use of memes
And now, as renewed scrutiny surrounds his name in connection to the files related to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, the politics of distraction are once again in full swing. According to public statements from members of Congress, including Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), more than a million references to Trump appear in heavily redacted documents tied to Epstein’s criminal network. The exact nature of those references remains contested and politically charged — but there are at least a million reasons why we should not be distracted by this government’s systematic attempts to obscure and/or politicize the full release of the evidence related to this billionaire pedophilic cartel.
It is precisely in moments such as these that spectacle becomes governance. Outrage becomes oxygen. Racist memes. Culture wars. Manufactured enemies. All flung with the velocity of distraction.
But don’t be fooled by the furious flinging of feces. The irony is almost unbearable. A president who once bristled at being compared to an orangutan now presides over an administration that routinely strips migrants, political opponents, and entire communities of dignity through language and a brutal set of policies. The man who sued over satire continues to thrive on insults and the politics of distraction. The litigant of late-night television has become the architect of a politics that casually administers cruelty.
Let’s be clear: personal insults, especially those with racial undertones, are not the path forward. We do not need to mirror dehumanization to expose it. The point is to recognize the pattern.
Those who rely on dehumanization understand its force. They deploy it because they fear it. And yes, those who resort to reductive attempts to undermine the humanity of others are often bereft of basic human decency. An Attorney General who cannot even look survivors in the eye, refusing to see them as human beings, wonders why legislators laugh at her as she “what-abouts” the stupid stock market.
The uncomfortable truth
The deeper issue before the country is not late-night comedy, nor internet memes. It is accountability. It is transparency. It is whether a billionaire class, long shielded by power, lawyers, and political alliances, can be meaningfully scrutinized when credible allegations with mountains of evidence surface. The Epstein saga is not a partisan sideshow; it is a window into how wealth and influence can warp justice.
And here is the uncomfortable truth: distraction works when we let it. When debates devolve into meme warfare, when policy disappears beneath performance, this American democratic experiment continues to be diminished.
Trump’s political power, if we can call it that, has always been his instinct for spectacle. He believes that if we are arguing about primates, we are not interrogating power. But history, especially Black history, has a way of distilling noise into narrative.
What will define this presidency will not be a joke about an orangutan. It will not be monkey memes. It will not be a lawsuit over satire. It will not even be the endless cycle of provocation and response. It will be whether the moral project of the republic—equal dignity under the law, accountability for the powerful, truth over theater—survives this era of spectacle.
The real question is not who resembles what animal. The real question is whether we, as citizens, can refuse to be distracted by the noise long enough to demand answers from those who wield power. Because democracy does not only die in darkness.
It also dies in distraction.
