Why President Trump Needs a History Lesson
Here's a tip, if you're going to speak at a Black History Month event: It helps to know a little black history.
President Donald Trump overlooked that advice as he delivered a rambling Black History Month address before engaging in a "listening session" with African-American professionals at the White House.
It didn't take long for the real estate developer and former star of "The Apprentice" to start talking about what seems to be his favorite topic, himself.
First, he repeated a worn-out assertion that he keeps making at speaking events that "the media" deliberately reported falsely that he had removed a bust of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office. In fact, the Time magazine reporter who was providing pool reports that day realized his mistake within minutes and sent out more than a dozen tweets correcting the mistake and apologizing. White House press secretary Sean Spicer tweeted back, "Apology accepted."
Still, Trump, the man who questioned President Barack Obama's birth certificate for five years, talks about the episode as if the reporter misreported on purpose. Why let anything as inconvenient as a lack of evidence impede his "running war" on the media?
Yet Trump showed less confidence as he dropped names of important African-Americans in history, including one particularly notable orator, activist, journalist and abolitionist.
"Frederick Douglass," he said, "is an example of somebody who's done an amazing job, that is being recognized more and more, I notice."
Yes, and just about everyone watching him on TV could hear Trump's use of the present tense. Did Trump think that Douglass, who died in 1895, is still alive?
In fairness, Paris Dennard, a black Republican CNN commentator who attended the meeting, defended Trump, saying his remark was actually referring to a Douglass exhibit in the new National Museum of African-American History in Washington. But even if that was his intent, Trump's odd sentence structure leaves me asking, as Dorothy Parker is said to have responded to news of President Calvin Coolidge's death, How can you tell?
Press secretary Spicer seemed to be caught completely off-guard by requests at a later news conference to clarify Trump's statement. But he forged ahead, sounding as confident as a man who actually knew what he was talking about, although not quite.
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