After firing off a pair of racially insensitive tweets the night before, President Donald Trump on Friday marked Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the end…
After firing off a pair of racially insensitive tweets the night before, President Donald Trump on Friday marked Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the end of slavery, with a written statement calling on Americans to commit “to live true to our highest ideals.”
He chose not to say anything in public on a day that had taken on new significance in a nation roiled by racial tension over police killings of African American men, even though just days earlier, he falsely took credit for making the holiday “very famous.”
He made the claim after getting blowback for scheduling a campaign rally on Juneteenth following weeks of protests calling for racial justice after the death of George Floyd.
Then, on Friday morning, he tweeted a threat against any protesters who showed up at the rally, now scheduled for Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of one of nation’s worse race massacres.
The juxtaposition of the formal presidential statement with the late night tweets was just the latest example of how the president has, in recent weeks, fluctuated between offering an occasional scripted message about the need for America coming together while also using more divisive language that has at times been racially charged.
His carefully-crafted Friday statement on Juneteenth came just hours after he tweeted out what a video that included what appeared to be a staged, fake story about a white man, wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, helping a black Uber driver, in which a woman takes a cell phone video of the incident and portrays it as the white man being racist.
The president also tweeted a video that was altered to look as if CNN had broadcast it with a fake chyron that claimed, “Racist baby probably a Trump voter.” Twitter then labeled the tweet as manipulated media.
In one of his most controversial tweets amid the calls for racial justice, the president tweeted a phrase that echoed controversial racist remarks from a past era.
“Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way,” the president tweeted in May.
