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Why Trump Is Trying to Steal Jesse Jackson’s Glory

The president wants you to know he had a Black friend, sort of.

Donald Trump and Jesse Jackson on June 27, 1988.

Donald Trump enjoys speaking ill of the dead. He is instinctively boorish and hates to be tied down by the conventional rules of civility that are predicated on the ideal of human equality. When John McCain died in 2018, a White House staffer had the flag lowered to half-mast, a perfectly normal gesture to a late senator. Trump countermanded that order and refused to pay tribute to McCain, only backtracking after a week of criticism. That same year, Trump resisted efforts to get him to visit a cemetery in France where 1,800 Americans who died in the First World War are buried. He reportedly asked staffers, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” Last December, when the director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, were brutally murdered, seemingly by their son, Trump wrote a remarkably nasty post saying that the killing was “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”

Given Trump’s history of disdain for the dead, one naturally feared for the worst when Jesse Jackson passed away on Tuesday. After all, Jackson was a left-wing Democrat and a giant of the civil rights era. Further, Jackson had often bluntly criticized Trump since the president entered politics in 2015. In 2018, Jackson lambasted Trump’s refusal to condemn the racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, saying, “The language of Donald Trump has been a source of shame for our nation.” In 2023, Jackson said, “Trump wants to pull us back into white supremacy.”

Given Trump’s racism, it wouldn’t have been surprising if he tried to desecrate Jackson’s memory with the same crassness of his attacks on McCain and Reiner. But Trump took the opposite route in a long post on Truth Social, writing, “I knew him well, long before becoming President. He was a good man, with lots of personality, grit, and ‘street smarts.’ He was very gregarious – Someone who truly loved people!”

To be sure, after this warm opening, Trump went into an extended variation of the tired racist trope that “I can’t be........

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