Trump held a Black History Month program at the White House just one week after posting a video depicting the Obamas as apes, and his behavior belied any sense of unbiasedness. For example, he introduced the crowd to the only Black member of his cabinet, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner, and the former tokenized HUD secretary Dr. Ben Carson. Trump then trotted out his other “Black friends” in the form of Fox News talking head and DOJ lawyer Leo Terrell…
and Dr. Martin Luther King’s anti-abortion activist niece, Alveda King. The idea of a King relative licking Trump’s boots during Black History Month is…quite something.
No “Black friend” celebration would be complete without Black celebs, so Trump invoked the name of Mike Tyson, saying:
“Mike Tyson, Boy, I tell you, Mike has been loyal to me. Whenever they come out, they say, ‘Trump’s a racist’ … Mike Tyson goes, ‘He’s not a racist, he’s my friend.’”
“He’s been there from the beginning, good times and bad. But Mike Tyson’s a great guy, and he was so loyal. Always been loyal.”
Trump also gave a weirdly fetishized shoutout to his new #1 fan, Onika Tanya Maraj, aka Nicki Minaj, by commenting on her “so beautiful skin” and her fingernails.
“I said, Nikki, are they real? She said she didn’t want to get into that, but she was so beautiful”
Be clear, there aren’t enough Black celebrities, athletes, or politicians to make Black folks at large forget about Trump’s historically racist comments and behaviors. Everything from his housing discrimination lawsuits to his full-page ad slandering the now-Exonerated Five, we remember it all.
