It turns out that not only did Trump not know about Juneteenth when he scheduled his rally for that day in Tulsa, none of his staff knew either.
Juneteenth celebrates the anniversary of the day in 1865 when an army general read out Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation in Texas, freeing slaves in a portion of the last un-emancipated state.
…But Trump told the Wall Street Journal that neither he nor any of his staff seemed to know the meaning of the holiday before the furor over the Tulsa rally.
…That lack of knowledge did not stop Trump claiming that his Tulsa rally had greatly helped popularize the holiday – which is already commemorated or observed by 47 states and the District of Columbia.
“I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous,” Trump told the newspaper. “It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.
The Journal reported that Trump said he had asked many people around him about the holiday and none of them had heard of Juneteenth. He then “paused the interview to ask an aide if she had heard of Juneteenth, and she pointed out that the White House had issued a statement last year commemorating the day”.
Trump responded: “Oh really? We put out a statement? The Trump White House put out a statement? OK, OK. Good.”
I suspect that every single black person knows about Juneteenth so that supposed lack of knowledge about the date suggests either that his staff is exclusively white or that Trump is using the familiar ‘nobody knew’ excuse as a cover for his own ignorance, despite the fact that the term is widely known and the day commemorated.
I grew up white on the extreme edge of the suburbs where they bump into rural land (though other houses were on my dead-end street, over my back fence was a wheat field), so we were a bit extra white, but the metro area I lived in was the whitest big city in the USA anyway, so you can imagine how many black families lived in my school district. and me? I learned about Juneteenth when I was 23 or 24 and was embarrassed not to have known about it before then, despite how white Portland is (and was).
I imagine making it to age 70 and not knowing about it takes a special kind of willful ignorance.
They are not ignorant. They know exactly which dogs they are whistling to.
June 12th was the fourth anniversary of the Pulse nightclub mass murder. Cheetolini attempted to rescind LGBTQIA rights on that exact day. There is a rally planned for August 27th, the 60th anniversary of “Axe Handle Saturday”.
When they chose June 19th, it was as deliberate as Al Qaeda choosing July 7th or March 11th. It’s done to send a message.
Per Amanda Marcotte’s Salon piece about Trump’s Tulsa trollery:
(The McEnany link Marcotte adequately summarizes. The “Trump campaign” link goes to a (Trump campaign manager) Brad Parscale tweet chastising Joe Biden for [allegedly] confusing a Trump Texas event on June 12 with the Tulsa event [then scheduled] on June 19, but makes it clear that “@TrumpWarRoom” already knew “Juneteenth is about emancipation”.)
Yeah, I’m British I know about it…
To quote the South Park movie:
“Have you ever heard of the Emancipation Proclamation?”
“I don’t listen to hip-hop.”
My money’s on deliberate trollery, but it’s pretty hard to tell these days… Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
I believe Inspector Bunker Baby didn’t know, but his staff did (Miller absolutely did). As usual, he’s clearly lying about asking his staff about it, and it’s obvious because, while he’s incapable of not lying, he’s also incapable of lying well. If he didn’t know it was significant, why would he ask anyone about it before the furor erupted? And what luck that the aide who just happened to be in the room to ask during the interview not only knew what it was, but also knew the WH had issued statements about it in previous years!
When he says “Nobody had ever heard of it,” he is making his views as clear as he possibly can.
Black people are nobodies. They are beneath his notice. This isn’t a dog-whistle, it’s a dog-orchestra.