Speaking Truth in Love

A Patriot's Rebuke

Dear Fellow Americans,

On Thursday night, February 5, 2026, the President of the United States posted a video to his Truth Social account. For sixty seconds, the video promoted debunked conspiracy theories about voting machines and election fraud. Then, at the sixty-second mark, the faces of Barack and Michelle Obama appeared, superimposed onto the bodies of apes. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played in the background. The video ended. The post stayed live for twelve hours.

This is not a political disagreement. This is evil.

The depiction of Black people as apes or monkeys is not merely offensive—it carries the full weight of American history’s most brutal dehumanization. This imagery was used to justify the enslavement of millions. It was used to justify lynching. It was used to justify Jim Crow. It was deployed, systematically and deliberately, to strip Black Americans of their humanity in order to make their subjugation palatable to white consciences. When the President of the United States posts such an image, he does not do so in ignorance of this history. He does so in full knowledge of its power to wound, to diminish, to dehumanize.

I spent twenty-four years in uniform. I served on submarines, worked alongside SEAL teams, and deployed to ports around the world. Every day of that service rested on a single foundational proposition: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. These are not aspirational words. They are the bedrock claim upon which this nation was founded. When we abandon that claim—when we permit our leaders to traffic in the very evil our founding documents rejected—we surrender the only ground upon which America has any right to exist.

Racism is evil. Not impolite. Not politically incorrect. Not an unfortunate lapse in judgment. Evil. And evil unchallenged becomes evil normalized.

What Happened and What Was Said

The video President Trump posted was sixty-two seconds long. Nearly all of it consisted of familiar conspiracy content about the 2020 election—claims about voting machines and ballot tampering that courts across the nation rejected. But at the sixty-second mark, without warning or explanation, the Obamas’ smiling faces appeared on the bodies of animated apes in a jungle setting. The clip lasted approximately one second. Then the video returned to its election fraud content and ended.

The post went live at 11:44 PM on Thursday night. It remained on the President’s account until noon Friday—twelve hours during which millions of Americans saw it, shared it, or defended it.

When reporters asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for comment Friday morning, she did not express regret. She did not acknowledge the racism. Instead, she said: “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

Stop the fake outrage. Report on something that actually matters.

A video depicting the first Black president and first lady in American history as apes—posted during Black History Month—and the official White House position was that this was fake outrage about something that doesn’t matter.

By noon Friday, after bipartisan outcry including from close Trump allies, the post was deleted. A White House official, speaking anonymously, said a staffer had “erroneously made the post.” Later that evening, speaking to reporters on Air Force One, President Trump said he had looked at the beginning of the video but not the end. “I guess during the end of it, there was some kind of picture people don’t like,” he said. “I wouldn’t like it either, but I didn’t see it.”

When asked if he would apologize, he said: “No, I didn’t make a mistake.”

When asked if he condemned the racist portion of the video, he said: “Of course I do.”

Of course I do. Said while refusing to apologize. Said while blaming a staffer. Said while insisting he made no mistake.

This is not President Trump’s first venture into this territory. For years, he promoted the lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to serve as president—a racist conspiracy theory designed to delegitimize the first Black president. During his first term, he referred to majority-Black developing nations as “shithole countries.” On the campaign trail in 2024, he said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”—language that echoes the dehumanizing rhetoric of the Nazis. And throughout this second term, his administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has operated with what can only be described as racial profiling, targeting individuals based on appearance rather than evidence.

This is a pattern. Thursday night’s post was not an aberration. It was the pattern made visible, undeniable, impossible to ignore.

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina—a Black Republican and one of Trump’s closest allies—wrote on social media: “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”

Even those who have stood beside him could not defend this.

My Confession

I voted for Donald Trump.

I did not like him. I found his behavior coarse, his ego insufferable, his treatment of others frequently cruel. But I believed—or told myself I believed—that personal character could be separated from governance. I thought he might be effective even if he was unpleasant. I looked at the alternatives offered and concluded that policy outcomes mattered more than personal virtue.

I was wrong.

This is not an easy thing to write. I live in rural Tennessee, surrounded by neighbors who voted as I did, who made the same calculations I made. Some of them are my friends. Many of them are good people who believed they were acting in the country’s best interest. I do not write this to condemn them wholesale or to claim some moral superiority I do not possess. I write this because I cannot stay silent about my own mistake, and because I believe others may be wrestling with the same recognition I have come to.

Here is what I failed to understand: you cannot separate a leader’s character from their capacity to lead justly. Effectiveness without morality is simply efficient evil. Power without principle is tyranny. I thought I could overlook his personal failings if he delivered on policy. What I did not see—what I refused to see—was that his failings were not personal quirks but revelations of who he fundamentally is. And who a leader is determines what they will do when the cameras are off, when the advisors have gone home, when the only constraint is their own moral compass.

Thursday night revealed what happens when there is no moral compass.

I spent twenty-four years defending this country. I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That Constitution begins with the claim that all men are created equal. I wore the uniform to protect that claim. And then I voted for a man who has spent his presidency demonstrating that he does not believe it.

My wife is a United States citizen. She was born in another country, learned English as a second language, and speaks with an accent. She has faced racism in our community—comments made in grocery store aisles by people who assume, based on her appearance, that she doesn’t speak English or doesn’t belong here. My children are mixed-race. They have been the targets of direct insults in the rural Tennessee community where we have chosen to raise them. These are not abstract political questions for my family. They are the lived reality of what happens when racism is normalized, when leaders model dehumanization, when evil goes unchallenged.

I cannot look my wife in the eye and defend the man I voted for. I cannot look my children in the eye and tell them I stood for their dignity while supporting a president who traffics in the same hatred they have faced.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

I have carried the burden of my vote for over a year now. It has grown heavier with each passing day. Thursday night broke something. Not because I was unaware of Trump’s character—I knew who he was when I voted—but because I can no longer pretend that my support was defensible, that my calculations were sound, that my vote did not make me complicit in what followed.

Evil reveals itself. The only question is whether we have the courage to name it when it does.

The Call to Stand

If I can admit I was wrong, so can you.

This is not about politics. The Democratic Party has its own failures, its own hypocrisies, its own moments of moral compromise. I am not writing this to advocate for one political party over another. I am writing this because there are moments when the political calculus must give way to basic human decency, when party loyalty must yield to moral clarity, when we must be willing to say: this is wrong, and I will not defend it.

Thursday night was such a moment.

We have been telling ourselves a lie. The lie goes like this: we can separate policy from character, effectiveness from morality, outcomes from the means used to achieve them. We tell ourselves that our discomfort with “the other side” justifies supporting deeply flawed leaders on “our side.” We tell ourselves that judges matter more than decency, that economic policy matters more than human dignity, that winning matters more than what we become in the process of winning.

This is the lie that allowed me to vote for Donald Trump. This is the lie that allows others to defend him still.

But what are we really being asked to defend? A man who depicted the first Black president and first lady of the United States as apes and refused to apologize. A man whose administration has turned immigration enforcement into a weapon of racial profiling. A man who has, again and again, demonstrated that he views entire categories of human beings as less than fully human.

At what price do we defend this? What do we sacrifice when we stay silent?

When we excuse this behavior, we become complicit in it. When we defend the indefensible, we normalize the abnormal. When we remain silent in the face of evil, we teach our children that power matters more than principle, that winning matters more than what is right, that their own dignity is negotiable if the political calculus demands it.

Some will say: “But the economy.” Some will say: “But the judges.” Some will say: “But the alternative would have been worse.”

To which I ask: at what price? What does it profit a nation to gain favorable economic indicators if it loses its soul? What good are judges if they preside over a society that has abandoned the foundational claim that all people are created equal? And if the alternative to racism is unacceptable to you, then you have already made your choice—and it was not the choice you think it was.

Some will say this is just one incident, that I am overreacting, that Trump posts inflammatory content all the time and we shouldn’t take it so seriously.

This is not one incident. This is the pattern made visible. And the fact that he “posts inflammatory content all the time” is not a defense—it is an indictment. We have become so accustomed to his racism that we treat it as background noise, as just another day in American politics. That normalization is itself the danger.

Some will say Trump didn’t mean it, or that he didn’t know, or that it was a staffer’s error.

He posted it. His press secretary defended it. He refused to apologize. Even if we accept—and I do not—that he somehow failed to watch the final seconds of a video he personally approved for posting, his response when confronted with it tells us everything we need to know. A decent person, upon discovering they had inadvertently posted racist content, apologizes immediately and without qualification. Trump blamed others and insisted he made no mistake.

Character reveals itself in how we respond when we are wrong.

Here is what I am asking of you, and of myself:

Name racism when you see it. Do not soften it. Do not contextualize it. Do not explain it away. Call it what it is.

Refuse to defend the indefensible. There are legitimate political disagreements to be had about tax policy, foreign relations, the proper scope of government. The dignity of human beings is not one of them.

Speak up even when—especially when—it is your own “side” that has erred. Partisanship is not loyalty. Loyalty to party above loyalty to principle is cowardice dressed in team colors.

Tell your representatives that this is unacceptable. If you voted for Trump, call your senator and congressman and tell them you expect better. If you have remained silent until now, break that silence. Democracy functions only when citizens hold their leaders accountable.

And if you voted for him, as I did: admit it was wrong.

This will cost something. I know because I am paying that cost as I write this. I live in a community where Trump won overwhelmingly. I will likely lose subscribers over this letter. I may lose the respect of friends and family who believe I have betrayed the conservative cause. So be it. Some things matter more than comfort. Some things matter more than belonging.

The Statue of Liberty bears these words: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

This is what America claimed to be. This is what we told the world we stood for. If we abandon that now—if we allow our leaders to mock and dehumanize the very people that promise was meant to welcome—then the lamp goes out, the door closes, and we become just another nation built on the lie that some lives matter more than others.

What We Choose Now

History will ask what we did in this moment.

Our children—my children, your children, all the children growing up in an America that will be shaped by the choices we make today—will ask what we stood for. They will not accept “I didn’t want to cause trouble” as an answer. They will not accept “everyone else was doing it” as a defense. They will ask: Did you speak? Or did you stay silent? Did you stand for what was right? Or did you calculate that the cost was too high?

I cannot tell my mixed-race children to accept the dignity the Declaration of Independence promises them and then remain silent when the President of the United States posts images designed to strip them of that dignity. I cannot tell them their lives matter and then defend a leader who demonstrates, through his actions, that he does not believe all lives matter equally.

This is not a test of political affiliation. This is a test of moral courage.

I served in uniform for twenty-four years. I stood watch on submarines in waters where detection meant death. I worked alongside SEAL teams in situations where split-second decisions determined whether everyone came home. The one thing those experiences taught me is this: you cannot serve two masters. You cannot simultaneously claim to defend freedom and excuse those who would deny it to others. You cannot wear the uniform of a nation founded on equality and then support leaders who treat equality as negotiable.

The American experiment depends on a single idea: that all people are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights. If we abandon that idea—if we allow it to be mocked, trampled, dismissed as “fake outrage”—then we abandon everything. The Constitution becomes a historical artifact. The Declaration becomes a museum piece. America becomes just another country where power determines worth and the strong define justice for the weak.

This is the test before us.

Not whether Donald Trump will change. He will not. He has shown us who he is again and again, and we should believe him. The test is whether we will change. Whether we will find the courage to name evil when we see it. Whether we will stand for the principles we claim to believe even when it costs us something.

The question is simple, and it demands an answer:

Will you speak?

Will you stand?

Or will you let this pass, normalized and accepted, woven into the fabric of what we tolerate, embedded in the foundation of what we become?

My children are watching. Yours are too. History is watching. And the answer we give—through our words or through our silence—will determine not just what kind of country we are, but whether the country we claim to be ever existed at all.

I have made my choice. I stood with evil once, in the privacy of a voting booth, believing I could manage the consequences. I will not stand with it again. I will not stay silent. I will not pretend that what happened Thursday night is acceptable, explainable, or anything other than what it is: a moral failure of the highest order, committed by the highest office in the land.

The future depends on what we do now. Not what we wish we could do, or what we would do if circumstances were different, or what we plan to do someday when the stakes are lower. What we do now. Today. This week. In this moment when evil has shown its face and asks us to look away.

Our children deserve better.

America deserves better.

We must demand better. And we must begin by demanding it of ourselves.

Respectfully,

Matthew M. Long

Matthew Long is a writer and retired sailor living in rural western Tennessee.