President Donald Trump congratulated himself for the controversy over his now-cancelled plans to hold a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Juneteenth, a holiday marking the end of slavery.
“I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous,” Trump said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Thursday.
“It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it,” he continued, saying that the people he had personally spoken to were unfamiliar with Juneteenth and that it was a black Secret Service agent who explained the holiday to him.
Not only is it patently false that people were unaware of Juneteenth up until now, Trump’s White House has been issuing statements on the holiday in his name since the beginning of his presidency — a fact that took the President by surprise when an aide pointed it out during the interview.
“Oh really? We put out a statement? The Trump White House put out a statement?” he asked. “Ok, ok. Good.”
Trump’s eyebrow-raising comments about race didn’t stop there: When asked if his invocation of the infamously racist phrase “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” with regards to the anti-police brutality protests was meant to be a threat or a fact, Trump said it was “a combination of both.”
Additionally, the President, who vehemently opposes stripping the names of Confederate soldiers from Army bases because it would “bring people apart,” admitted he has not reached out to any black supporters to discuss the issue.
Trump also told the Wall Street Journal that the reason his entourage of supporters at his infamous photo-op in front of St. John’s Church was made up of entirely of white people was because there weren’t any black supporters at the White House.
