President Donald Trump faced renewed accusations of racism after spending part of Monday night, May 11, reposting a series of videos on his Truth Social platform that featured Black people either engaged in criminal activity or behaving badly in public.
The first video Trump reposted showed an overweight man tipping a restaurant server’s tray of food to the floor as he exited the establishment, with the original caption describing the man using a profane insult.
A second video showed a restaurant worker confronting a Black DoorDash driver outside an eatery, accusing her of cancelling an order after picking up the food, with the caption “Always scheming…” before footage of a physical altercation between the two women.
A third video, reposted from an X user named Tara Bull, showed Black children stealing snacks from a Wawa convenience store chain, with the caption blaming the shoplifting behaviour for Wawa closing stores.
No statement accompanying the posts explained why Trump shared the videos or what point he was seeking to make, and the White House did not immediately offer a formal explanation for the president’s activity.
Journalist Aaron Rupar posted the videos to Threads and asked why the sitting president was sharing that content, prompting a wave of responses from critics who said the answer was self-evident.
Among the widely-circulated replies, one user wrote that Trump was posting content about Black children stealing candy while he himself had “invented a sh-tty Memecoin, told all of his cult followers to buy it, then rug-pulled it,” a reference to Trump’s TRUMP meme coin launch and its subsequent price collapse.
Critics across social media drew similar conclusions, with one Threads user writing that the posts were designed to show the MAGA base that Trump was “still their guy,” particularly at a moment when core supporters are facing record-high gas prices, rising food costs, and potential cuts to health insurance.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has consistently denied that Trump holds racist views, issuing statements after prior controversies including a February 2026 incident in which Trump shared a video that ended with a clip depicting former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as primates.
Trump subsequently removed that video from Truth Social, claiming he had not noticed the clip at the end, though the episode prompted bipartisan backlash at the time.
Trump’s social media history involving race extends back decades, with the Justice Department having sued Trump, his father, and their company in 1973 over alleged systematic racial discrimination against Black, Puerto Rican, and other non-white tenants in their rental properties, a case the Trumps eventually settled without admitting guilt.
Researchers at the Brookings Institution found that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was significantly shaped by racial and anti-immigrant sentiment, with studies concluding that supporter alignment tracked more closely with those themes than with economic anxiety alone.
