President Donald Trump thinks very highly of himself. This Wednesday at the White House, he compared himself to Abraham Lincoln — again. He suggested that he has possibly done more for black Americans than Lincoln — which is ridiculous! Lincoln freed the slaves. Other presidents, who Trump claimed that he’s definitely done more for black Americans than, have accomplishments among them like the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, which were both signed in the 1960s by then-President Lyndon Johnson. Far more recently, the administration of Barack Obama even implemented a federal housing rule meant to help end vestiges of segregation — and Trump threw it out, claiming that he was keeping an “invasion” of low-income housing from spreading into the “suburbs.”
In short — Trump is delusional. At the White House on Wednesday, he said:
‘I’ve done more for the Black community than any other president — and I say with a possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, and I mean that with opportunity zones, and with criminal justice reform, with prison reform, with what we’ve done for historically black universities, colleges, schools — nobody’s done more. Abraham Lincoln, let’s give him the nod, but beyond that, nobody’s done more.’
Wow, how stupendous — Trump made sure to give a “nod” to Abraham Lincoln. In reality — Trump has no idea what he’s talking about. Watch the video of his remarks below:
President Trump: "I've done more for the Black community than any other president — and I say with a possible exception of Abraham Lincoln." pic.twitter.com/oTU8jXczh1
— The Hill (@thehill) September 23, 2020
The “opportunity zones” that he’s referring to are areas that have been designated that businesses get tax incentives for investing in. The most acute beneficiaries of this program are the businesses getting the tax breaks — not the people in the actual community. The whole program seems like another classically Republican example of relying on a vague and dubiously-defined notion of some kind of “trickle-down economics” to solve the nation’s problems. In reality, that’s not the way the economy consistently works — for example, after Trump’s monumental 2017 tax cuts that dramatically lowered tax rates for businesses, record rates of corporations buying back their own stock were recorded. That’s not exactly community assistance.
Trump also peddles brazen racism. He has claimed that a rule that had been formulated by the Obama team that demanded communities take a look at ways in which they could desegregate housing meant that suburbs would be overrun. This claim is untrue — although a GOP convention speaker and the president himself have explicitly claimed otherwise, Democrats do not want to “abolish” the suburbs. That’s just thinly veiled, delusional race-baiting, since it’s marginalized communities who are most often associated with low-income housing.
