Source: NICHOLAS KAMM / Getty
At this point, President Donald Trump’s administration has become a caricature of itself.
Trump’s cabinet already includes a Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary who spreads medical misinformation, dabbles in medical racism, and doesn’t seem to know the difference between Medicare and Medicaid. We also have a Secretary of Defense who doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp on who our international allies are, a counterterrorism leader who thinks Jan. 6 terrorists were “political prisoners,” and a “border czar” who wouldn’t be able to grasp constitutional law if it were a brown person sneaking over the southern border without proper paperwork.
Of course, now, Trump appears to be eyeing the first Black person as someone who could be part of his administration since he gave a Black guy the Department of Housing and Urban Development spot, which seemed to be the only “Black job” that was ever available in his Cabinet.
Now, get ready for President Donald Trump’s — *checks notes* — “pardon czar.”
From CBS News:
President Trump is tapping Alice Johnson, the 69-year-old grandmother he granted clemency in his first term over long-ago drug offenses, to be his “pardon czar.”
The president made the announcement during a Black History Month event in the White House East Room Thursday afternoon. Johnson spent over 21 years in prison for nonviolent drug-related crimes when Mr. Trump commuted her sentence and she was released in 2018. Mr. Trump later issued her a full pardon.
“You’ve been an inspiration to people, and we’re going to be listening to your recommendation on pardons,” Mr. Trump told Johnson on Thursday. ” You’re going to go over and you’re going to be — you’re going to, she’s going to be my pardon czar, okay? And you’re going to find people just like you that should not this should not have happened. It should not have happened. So you’re going to look and you’re going to make recommendations, and I’ll follow those recommendations, okay? For pardons. All right?”
Mr. Trump said Johnson was “in prison for doing something that today probably wouldn’t even be prosecuted.”
First of all, this couldn’t be the same Donald Trump who, just a few years ago, suggested WNBA star Brittney Griner’s stay in a Russian jail was justified because she was “loaded up with drugs,” when she was actually only “loaded up” with less than a gram of cannabis oil.
Secondly, is Trump just creating random positions and throwing the word “czar” behind it now? I swear he’s the overtly bigoted version of every cartoon mayor ever.
Lastly, it’s pretty clear that Trump was using his BLM celebration to pander to his few Black supporters via a call back to the pardons that occurred under his first administration, which included a lot of Black people who were locked up for nonviolent offenses but also included cops convicted for egregious police brutality, and U.S. soldiers convicted of massacring more than a dozen Iraqi civilians unprovoked. (For the sake of bandwidth, I won’t waste time harping on the 1,500 some odd domestic terrorists Trump recently pardoned after they were convicted for the attack on the U.S. Capitol that he instigated.)
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good thing that Johnson and others like her were released, but we’re not going to pretend Trump’s motive was social justice and not his shameless agenda of collecting “Black friends” while serving as arguably the most anti-Black president in recent history.
Nah, we’re not about to let him gaslight us like this.
Let me stop before he appoints a “gaslight czar.”
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Op-Ed: Delusional Black Trump Supporter Reaches FAFO Phase After Friend Loses Federal Job
