Who are we kidding, Donald Trump doesn’t care about Black History Month
File this under ‘things that surprise literally no one’
I am already sick of writing about Donald Trump. He’s only been POTUS for 12 days and I am sick of writing about him, his shenanigans, and his borderline illegal, unconstitutional, and un-American executive orders. But there’s theories that this is a play to overwhelm us while he and more notably Steve Bannon do some really diabolical shit behind the scenes. But I digress….
Yesterday, Donald Trump sat in a room full of containing black people, with his new Secretary of Colored People Affairs, Ben Carson on one side and his Head House Negress, Omarosa Manigault on the other. The purpose of him sitting in that room with those black people was to talk about Black History Month. What happened next was less a well thought-out speech about the contributions of black Americans, but really just him rambling incoherently. And when he wasn’t, he was busy talking about himself and how shitty the media has been to him since he became POTUS. You can find the full transcript of his remarks here. But here are some of the “best” parts of his speech.
He started off talking about Dr. Martin Luther King Junior and made it exactly one sentence before going off on a weird tangent about a reporter who incorrectly tweeted that the bust MLK had been removed from the Oval Office before having it pointed out and swiftly apologizing. He spent the next 10 sentences talking about that.
Then his lips flapped again and uttered probably the weirdest and most troubling, well, here just read it for your damn self:
“I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things. Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I noticed. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and millions more black Americans who made America what it is today. Big impact.”
What the fuck is he talking about?? Judging from this statement he clearly has no fucking idea who Frederick Douglass is or that he’s been dead for 122 years. He literally threw out the names of the four most famous historical black people that he and his inner circle of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller could think of and created a word salad of former slaves and civil rights activists. This is reminiscent of that kid in class who was called on to talk about his book report when he hadn’t read the book or written the report. That kid was usually pretty embarrassed. But as we’ve all come to know, embarrassment is not an emotion our current President is capable of. Apparently none of the other white guys in his administration seem to know who Frederick Douglass is either as evidenced by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (you know, the guy who blatantly lied to the White House Press Corp about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd) who gave a similarly bizarre and perfunctory answer when asked about him later on.
He then goes on to say:
“I’m ready to do my part, and I will say this: We’re gonna work together. This is a great group, this is a group that’s been so special to me. You really helped me a lot. If you remember I wasn’t going to do well with the African-American community, and after they heard me speaking and talking about the inner city and lots of other things, we ended up getting—and I won’t go into details—but we ended up getting substantially more than other candidates who had run in the past years.”
Apparently to Donald Trump, the only thing black people care about is the “inner city,” where he more than likely assumes we all live, probably with our grandmothers who are all named Pearl. We don’t care about taxes or the environment or terrorism. The only thing we care about is this white billionaire bringing prosperity to the ghetto. And for his patronizing condescension, we thanked him with precisely eight percent of the black vote! Yuge! Thanks for remembering us poor wretched darkies in the ghetto Mr Trump! Or so he believes in that delusional mind of his.
He then ended the conference by telling people that Omarosa is actually “a very nice person” and thanked everyone for coming to witness that fuckshit.
What is most glaringly obvious about all of this is that he didn’t want to be there and doesn’t give a shit about Black History or the entire 28 days we’ve set aside to celebrate it. At this point it would have been less disrespectful if he walked into the room and signed an executive order canceling Black History Month altogether. At least that would have seemed more genuine than the ghastly, unintelligible babbling that took place in that room. Donald Trump needs to stop pretending that he gives a shit about Black History Month, and more specifically black history and black people.
I threw in some past speeches about Black History Month from former Presidents here, here, and here.
Happy Black History Month.