Vice President JD Vance, asked about a video President Trump posted on Truth Social depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, told reporters:

It’s not a real controversy. We have much, much more real problems to focus on.

The dangerous, racist video was up for twelve hours.

The White House claimed a staffer posted it without watching it.

Trump claimed he only saw the beginning.

Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called it “an internet meme” about “the King of the Jungle” and told reporters to “stop the fake outrage.”

Vance is not denying racism. Instead he’s saying this specific instance of racism doesn’t count. It’s just social media. You post something that causes huge reactions and harms, you take it down. No accountability.

This is more strategically useful than an open denial. It promotes racism as an abstract concept while ensuring it can never be identified when deployed in practice.

Every concrete case gets covered up and reclassified: this one has a hood on, this one’s a meme, that one’s a staffing error, the other one’s fake outrage. Vance knows when applied consistently he produces a white nationalist system where racism is always harming Americans while “officially” never actually occurring.

Asked whether Trump should apologize, Vance said:

For posting a video and then taking it down? No, I don’t think so.

What about for burning a cross and then taking it down?

Depicting Black people as apes is one of the oldest and most recognizable racial dehumanization tropes in American history.

It is not ambiguous.

It is not a meme.

It is not a controversy about social media management.

The Vice President of the United States knows this and is promoting racism by pretending he’s not denying it while denying the most obvious form.

His refusal to recognize it is the message: this is a white man’s country.