While serious and much-needed conversations are happening around the country on racial justice and police reform, and an uptick in COVID-19 cases have governors and health officials near panic, and the unemployment rate is at 20 percent, the president of the United States is busy on Twitter propping himself up, complaining about private businesses who refuse to do his bidding, and bragging about forcing West Point graduates to come listen to his commencement speech/campaign rally. In other words, it’s just another day in the U.S.A. under Donald J. Trump.
While it’s commendable that Trump finally began to understand that the backlash against his Juneteenth rally might be louder than the dog whistle racism his supporters respond to so well, it took some serious tone-deafness to schedule a rally on that day at all. Let’s not pretend that any of Trump’s “friends” convinced him to do the right thing; he did so because he wants to win in November. His previous plans are what the country has to look forward to with a second Trump term once he has no voters to worry about. By the way, the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma does not hold 200,000 people. Its capacity is under 20,000.
Trump’s tweets about Comcast are rather alarming. Every cable provider includes NBC, including NBC News, as well as MSNBC. Why Trump is choosing to attack them or cable providers who air them, or why a president is attacking a private business on social media at all, is a question Americans shouldn’t have to ask themselves because it just shouldn’t happen.
The most tone deaf and outrageous of Trump’s tweets, however, are about criminal justice reform. Trump did get the First Step Act passed, which is laudable. But to say criminal justice reform is “done” while black Americans still disproportionately sit in prisons for the same crimes white people commit, while black Americans are still murdered in the streets by police without consequence, and while protests rage across the country over the treatment of black Americans at the hands of law enforcement, saying anything is “done” is just outrageous.
Twitter was quick to react to Trump’s nonsense tweets on a Saturday morning. Read some of their comments below:
Featured image screenshot via YouTube
