But I'm gonna go with when he brought up school choice. "We’re fighting for school choice," he insisted, and added, "which really is the civil rights of all time in this country. Frankly, school choice is the civil rights statement of the year, of the decade, and probably beyond — because all children have to have access to quality education." Yeah, fuck you, Brown vs. Board of Education. School choice pisses on you.
Just a recap: "School choice" is about giving parents vouchers that they can use to help pay for private schools, taking money away from public education (or "failing government schools," as President Dickhead called them) and giving it to churches and private organizations and, yes, Secretary of Education and hideous greed beast Betsy DeVos. Oh, and Trump's proposal on this also includes a tax credit that would benefit the wealthy because of course it would. Calling this a civil rights "statement" (whatever the fuck that is) or anything related to civil rights just because it would end up benefiting some non-white people is so laughable that you can't tell if those are tears of joy, rage, or sadness.
But what this points to with Trump is that he doesn't know jack shit about African Americans. He doesn't understand issues surrounding their community, he doesn't give a fuck about their lives, he can't be bothered to learn their history, and, if you ask, he'll tell you that no one knows more about black people than he does.
As racist as Trump has been his whole worthless life, the last few weeks have given him ample opportunity to relish his role as bigoted ignoramus-in-chief. Oh, he'll tell you how amazing he is for African Americans. He'll tell you, as he did on Tuesday and every other time he opens his gaping burger maw, "We created Opportunity Zones with Senator Tim Scott...I think it’s probably one of the great things that we’ve done in this administration. Tens of thousands of jobs, billions and billions of dollars being brought into areas and neighborhoods that would never, ever, ever be taken care of, monetarily." (Again, a reminder, this was during a speech about alleged reforms to stop police officers from murdering black people.)
The problem is that Trump's full of shit. "Opportunity Zones" are another motherfucking tax cut to get wealthy people to, yes, invest in communities that need the investment. But guess what? They're fucking using it to gentrify areas and very little is going to black entrepreneurs. No, it hasn't created "tens of thousands of jobs" any more than Ivanka Trump has created 80 gajillion jobs or whatever the fuck number we're up to. But he's not letting go of that lie. "The Opportunity Zones have been incredible," Trump told Sean Hannity last night. "It's been one of the great -- really one of the great things, in terms of investment in areas and in terms of unemployment."
Trump'll shuck and jive about low unemployment pre-COVID or criminal justice reform, which he thinks makes him the Greatest President for the Blacks Since Lincoln (although, you know, even Lincoln's "questionable"). But the low unemployment is just a continuation of the progress made under Obama. It went down 9 percentage points during Obama's administration. It's gone down an additional 2 at its lowest last year under Trump. So that makes Obama worth over 4 times as many Trumps. And it's back to where it was in 2010 now in the fucked economy after Trump dickered around and didn't do a goddamn thing to mitigate the job losses during the shutdown.
And it's not just his fake accomplishments that he keeps tooting his fleshy orange horn about. Trump's grasp of how Americans understand black history is goddamned embarrassing. This motherfucker is taking credit for Juneteenth. No, really. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said about scheduling his hate rally in Tulsa on June 19, "I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous. It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it."
Think of the framing of that. "Nobody" means him and white people. It excludes, for instance, African Americans, most of whom have fucking heard of Juneteenth because it's so goddamn important. Trump said, "I had political people who had no idea." And then he asked an assistant, "Did you ever hear of Juneteenth before?" who, in a hilarious moment, responded that she learned about it when the White House put out a statement last year for the date, as it had every year. Even then, Trump couldn't help but be a fucking dickzit. "I don’t think it was put up by others. But we made people aware of it," he said, implying that no previous president had recognized it, despite the fact that both Barack Obama and George W. Bush issued multiple statements for Juneteenth. Trump did admit, "Actually, a young African-American Secret Service agent knew what it was." No shit.
Even on the most pressing racial issue, the one that caused him to have his fucking weirdo police event, the protests over the deaths of black people at the hands of police and people who took the law into their hands, Trump's proud ignorance just highlights his unabashed racism. He's pissed that people are still even talking about how he's failed to lead (as if he ever led a goddamn thing in his life other than the line to the omelet bar at Mar-a-Lago). The New York Times reported, "The remarks he made about [George] Floyd when he attended the launch of the SpaceX spacecraft should have been enough, the president told aides."
He couldn't be bothered to learn the names of the people who were killed. Asked by the WSJ about meeting with the families of murdered black Americans, as he did on Tuesday before speaking, if any stories stood out, Trump said, acting like he was asked about favorite passages of the Bible, "All of them." Pressed on it, he offered, "Ahmed. Ahmad. He is the young man who was running. It was just sad to see. Mother was a fantastic woman. Made a great impression. They all made a great impression on me." And then, forgetting Ahmaud Arbery's name, he moved on to how important his law enforcement speech was.
By the way, the families declined to appear at the ceremony where Trump gave that speech and signed his bullshit executive order. A lawyer described the meeting with Trump as "very contentious." Did they think this void of a human-shaped rage vessel would want anything more than to hear their praise? Did they expect empathy when, really, Trump probably thought they should comfort him for all that their loved ones' deaths had put him through politically? What a fucking tragic farce.
And, when it comes to Rayshard Brooks, the black man who was sleeping in his car at Wendy's drive-thru in Atlanta and got shot in the back running from police, well, Trump isn't gonna try to pretend to give a jolly donkey shit. On Crazy Sean Hannity's Circus of Self-Fellatio, Trump said, "I heard today and just got a report that the police officer's lawyer said that he heard a sound like a gun, like a gunshot. And he saw a flash in front of him. So, that's an interesting -- you know, I don't know that I would have necessarily believed that. But I will tell you, that's -- that's a very interesting thing." That's the kind of punk-ass shit he does all the time. He's not saying something's true. He's just asking questions about things he "heard," whether it's about the supposed "miracle" of hydroxychloroquine or the possible sinister motives of the elderly man pushed over by police in Buffalo. We call that the "little bitch" approach to arguments.
Trump's actually going along with much of conservative media on Brooks. As far as Tucker Carlson's bitch face and the rest of the right-wing machine are concerned, they're done pretending that cops do anything bad. Brooks pointed a taser at a cop and didn't listen to every word the cop said, so he deserved to die. Trump is always an echo chamber for whatever he saw on the TV just before speaking.
Back at the police "reform" event, Trump concluded his speech, in part, with this odd statement: "To go forward, we must seek cooperation, not confrontation; we must build upon our heritage, not tear it down." Yeah, that cruel orange bastard wrapped up an event that happened because white people murdered black people by saying we shouldn't tear down symbols of the Confederacy. Motherfucker, if we really were tearing down our heritage of American racism, almost nothing would remain standing.
