President Donald Trump seemingly turned into a civil rights champion as he mourned the death of Rev. Jesse Jackson.
The 79-year-old president went on yet another Truth Social posting spree on Tuesday after the pioneering civil rights activist and protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. died at 84.
Trump honored Jackson’s memory by posting a dozen photos of them together over the years and hailing him as “a force of nature like few others.”
“I knew him well, long before becoming President,” Trump wrote. “He was a good man, with lots of personality, grit, and ‘street smarts.’ He was very gregarious – Someone who truly loved people!”
“Despite the fact that I am falsely and consistently called a Racist by the Scoundrels and Lunatics on the Radical Left, Democrats ALL, it was always my pleasure to help Jesse along the way,” he continued, touting the help that he provided Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a renowned social justice advocacy group established in 1984.
Trump also took the opportunity to take shots at Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, as “a man who Jesse could not stand.” Though Obama and Jackson’s relationship was occasionally strained, it was largely characterized by mutual respect and support.
The president then went on a Truth Social blitz, posting 12 images of him and Jackson as he reminisced about their relationship not with personal photos, but through images watermarked with the Getty logo and one screenshot of a news article.
But Jackson’s son, Jesse Jackson Jr., painted a different image of his father’s relationship with Trump in an interview with CNN’s The Situation Room.
“One of his last communications to the President of the United States was about tenor. It was about tone. It was about spirit, energy, and it was about the unique challenge before the President of the United States to bring all Americans together, and we see it on a daily basis, the failings of the administration to do just that,” the younger Jackson said.
“And so he was hopeful that his unique relationship with the president might bring a different tenor and tone, and unfortunately, he was never the recipient of a return phone call from the President of the United States,” he added.
In 2023, the reverend warned in an interview with The New Republic that “Trump wants to pull us back into white supremacy.”
In 2017, Jackson described Trump’s presidential campaign as “unusually violent.” He told Politico that it was “a divisive campaign full of race targeting: People in Mexico were going to be stopped by a wall; Muslims were going to be kept from coming in; there was a whole campaign saying Barack had not been born here.”
A year before that, Jackson also called out Trump for peddling the conspiracy theory that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and therefore ineligible for the presidency. Obama was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961, to an American citizen mom.
“I submit to you when you do the birther movement on the president, which is a dog whistle kind of anti-Black, the anti-Mexican, the deportation of 15 million people, of families, disruption, anti-Muslim. That kind of rhetoric has helped to seed these clouds,” Jackson told Fox News in 2016 after two Black men were killed by police in Dallas, Texas.
Trump’s Jackson-inspired posting spree came on the heels of massive backlash after the president posted a racist video depicting Obama and former first lady Michelle as gorillas. The video was eventually taken down, but Trump refused to apologize, blaming the post on a staffer.
In 1989, Trump took out full-page advertisements in four New York City newspapers calling to “Bring Back the Death Penalty” amid the firestorm over the Central Park Five.
“When Donald Trump took out that full-page ad, and put them in all of New York City’s newspapers, calling for our execution, he placed a bounty on our head,” Yusef Salaam, who was one of five Black teenagers wrongly convicted of the rape and assault of a white woman in Central Park, said in 2019. “They had published our names, our phone numbers, and our addresses in New York City’s newspapers. Imagine the horror of that.”
But Trump remained defiant. “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt,” Trump said in 2019. “If you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city never should have settled that case—so we’ll leave it at that.”
The convictions of all five men were vacated in 2002.
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