Trump Commemorates Charlottesville By Patting Himself On The Back For Black Unemployment

Donald Trump commemorated the one-year anniversary of the deadly events in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday by bragging about how low he has pushed the African American unemployment rate.

In a pair of tweets, Trump gave a weak condemnation of “all types of racism” before bragging about having personally “fought for and secured the LOWEST African American and Hispanic unemployment rates in history.”

Trump’s one-year response to the events in Charlottesville wasn’t much of an improvement from his initial spewings last year when he equated white supremacists with their counter-protesters.

“You had some very bad people in that group,” the president said. “But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

It was the racist dog whistle heard around the world, one that further activated the most racist and vile elements of American society.

Saturday’s statement from the president in which he refers to “all types of racism” seems to be an updated version of his “very fine people on both sides” garbage.

Trump is also wrong on the substance

It’s not just the tone that missed the mark in Trump’s statements on Saturday. He struck out on the substance, too, in his repeated claim that he created

Nobody believes either that Trump cares about or deserves credit for the downward decline in African American unemployment. He’s just slapping his name on his predecessor’s work.

As Joe Scarborough pointed out earlier this year, the black jobless rate began to sharply decline in 2010, when Barack Obama was president and it hasn’t stopped since.

This downward trend started well before Trump’s presidential candidacy was even an idea. It’s not as if he took office amidst increasing African American unemployment and implemented policies to turn it around.

Like much of his personal wealth, a strong economy was something Trump inherited. He deserves no credit for simply having it handed to him.

Above all else, what Saturday’s Twitter ramblings showed America is that Donald Trump still hasn’t figured out how to adequately condemn white supremacist hate one year after the fatal events in Charlottesville.

The reason for that is simple: This racist hate fuels his political agenda and energizes his base. Without it, he has nothing.

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Sean Colarossi

Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.

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