Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally at Festival Park on June 18, 2024, in Racine, Wisconsin. | Source: Scott Olson / Getty
In what could either be a Freudian slip or just a case of poor wording – or, more likely, a fine blend of both, and more – Donald Trump’s presidential campaign on Wednesday issued a statement to commemorate Juneteenth that included questionable verbiage.
And considering the fact that Juneteenth is specifically a federal holiday celebrating and honoring Black American culture – something for which Trump has been repeatedly chastised and accused of being disingenuous, at best – the way the statement was written might raise some eyebrows.
It also can’t be ignored that the statement didn’t come from Trump himself and instead was attributed to the “Team Trump Black Media Director.”
It was in that context that Janiyah Thomas suggested that Juneteenth is a day that should be used in part to “remember that light will always triumph over darkness.”
Thomas’s full statement, which never actually mentions “Juneteenth” by name once, follows below:
“All slaves are free!” This was the cry that rang out on June 19th, 1865. The principle of freedom has always been at the foundation of the Republican party. Today, we reflect on how far we have come as a nation and remember that light will always triumph over darkness. With President Trump’s leadership, our party will continue to advance the American dream for all people.
The decision to contrast the words “light” and “darkness” in a statement about a federal holiday that’s also referred to as Black Freedom Day and marks the abolition of slavery in the state of Texas could easily be interpreted as the latest example of racist dog-whistling coming from Trump’s camp, what with its track record of racial rhetoric.
The fact that no one in Team Trump thought those string of words could be greeted as problematic also speaks volumes about the levels of racial awareness within the campaign.
It’s all pretty par for the course.
After all, Trump has a decades-long documented history of discriminating against Black people, in particular, with racist language and has more recently been employing racist tropes in his outreach efforts to Black voters.
He’s also used cryptic phrases to rally his notoriously racist base, including when he told the Proud Boys to “stand by” as it pertains to political violence. The Proud Boys, a notorious far-right extremist group that trafficks in white supremacy, of course, were coincidentally at the center of the so-called Stop the Steal rally that led to the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump’s supporters tried and failed to prevent Joe Biden’s presidential election results from being certified.
If anything deserved to be contrasted, it is Trump’s campaign commemorating a Black-centered federal holiday with its candidate’s own actions toward Black America, including just this past weekend happily participating in an event hosted by a suspected white supremacist group that declared the upcoming season to be a “white boy summer.”
That is nothing to speak of the allegedly staged event at a Black church in Detroit on Saturday that was disproportionately attended by white people who don’t live in that city.
In fact, the Trump Campaign’s Juneteenth statement comes less than two months after Trump complained about the “problem” of the “anti-white feeling” he senses in the U.S.
It was in that context that the Trump Campaign said on Juneteenth that the “light will always triumph over darkness.”
This is America.
SEE ALSO:
Juneteenth: The Civil War Was A Black Revolution
This Juneteenth, Let’s Focus On Real Solutions To Address The Racial Wealth Gap
