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John from New Mexico, a self-professed lifelong Republican, called into C-Span’s Washington Journal earlier this month with penitence on his mind.
“I voted for the president and supported him,” he began. “But I really want to apologize.”
The caller said he had been staring at an image Americans have seen far too often in recent days: Barack and Michelle Obama, the former president and first lady, with their mouths stretched into grotesque grins and their faces affixed to the bodies of apes. Posted to President Trump’s Truth Social account the night before the C-Span show aired, someone deleted it the next day – but what remained was the all-too-real outrage. John from New Mexico shared it.
“What an embarrassment to our country,” the caller continued. “All this man does is tell lies. He is not worthy of the presidency. He takes bribes blatantly, and now he’s being a racist blatantly.” When the anchor, Greta Brawner, asked whether he had supported Trump in all three elections, John did not hesitate. “I did,” he said. “I was sucked into the stupidity of creating jobs. There are no more jobs. Things are worse than they were before.”
To his credit, John did not sound as though he was seeking forgiveness. The image of the nation’s first Black president and first lady rendered as simians appeared to snap something into focus – belatedly, but unmistakably. The racism was not new; what was new was his inability to look past it. For a moment, at least, the blinders were off, and he was willing to tell the nation.
Millions of voters continue to rationalize the same machinery John claims to have finally recognized, despite the president’s collapsing approval ratings across nearly every major issue. They have cast a ballot, some as many as three times, for a candidate who is allergic to accountability.
That can’t be healthy for the country, and it hasn’t been. The consequences of Trump’s second term have been both unmistakable and unforgivable. His administration has harassed and arrested journalists. The president and his family have enriched themselves on a staggering scale – $4bn, by the New Yorker’s count. Critical climate policy has been hollowed out. Amid a struggling economy and cratering job market, he and his acolytes keep scapegoating immigrants for the country’s ills.
The human toll is harder to tally, but no less real. We can calculate the lives lost to Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of both Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria and the Covid pandemic during his first term, as well as his continuing promotion of junk science. We can document the deaths and abuses inside immigration detention facilities. We can already see the global consequences of dismantling humanitarian aid and environmental safeguards. Even so, the full damage – to institutions, to norms, to lives shortened – remains incalculable.
The conservative commentator Ben Shapiro recently acknowledged Trump’s flaws, but argued they were not “disqualifying” given the alternative of Kamala Harris in the last presidential election. This is the calculus: not denial of harm, but acceptance of it as a tolerable cost. That acceptance is what requires accountability – not just the initial vote, but everything that followed while voters looked away.
And yet, day after day, elected officials and commentators continue to agonize over how to talk about Trump’s voters without offending them. I understand the political instinct. There’s a greater risk than discourtesy, however. Politeness too often curdles into absolution. In the effort to avoid honesty, responsibility quietly disappears.
That is why I thank John for his apology – and why I refuse to accept it.
This is not a personal slight. It is a political judgment. In American life, apology and regret have become substitutes for accountability. Remorse in politics tends to emerge only after harm is undeniable, irreversible or inconvenient to ignore. Apology and regret mark the end of a conversation when they should mark the beginning of one.
We have seen this pattern before. The federal government has issued formal apologies for historical atrocities tied to slavery and racial subjugation, for the conquest of Hawai’i, for the Tuskegee syphilis experiments – as well as, during the Biden administration, the abuse within federal boarding schools of Native American children. Some apologies, such as those issued to surviving Japanese American internees, went a bit beyond “sorry” and included modest reparations. These apologies, imperfect though they are, at least acknowledged harm.
It’s good to see even a small number of Republicans now demanding that Trump apologize for his latest racist post, but their rejection of true accountability renders those demands hollow. Some do not even seem to grasp the urgency of the problem. Senator Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, deemed it “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House”. That statement says less about Trump’s post than about Republicans’ long effort to strip the word “racism” of any meaning that might implicate their own power.
Despite remarks like Scott’s, the exhaustion these moments produce is not personal. It is generational. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, it remains trapped in the same moral loop regarding race and racism: harm, denial, then belated remorse without repair. Apologies buy time, but for whom?
Expressing regret is meant to be the start of a reckoning, but too often it feels like an abrupt ending. What Americans need to confront is not the denial of harm, but the acceptance of it as a tolerable cost – a choice repeated again and again, through policy, silence, and the machinery voters empower. If regret does not compel responsibility, it amounts to little more than moral convenience, a way to soothe conscience while leaving power and consequence unchanged. If they are truly sorry for supporting Trump, they must do more than just say so.
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Jamil Smith is a Guardian US columnist
