Policy / February 20, 2026
The president wants you to know that he had something of a black friend.
Donald Trump and Jesse Jackson on June 27, 1988.
(Ron Galella Collection / Ron Galella via Getty Images) Donald Trump likes to speak ill of the dead. He is instinctively rude and hates being bound by conventional rules of civility based on the ideal of human equality. When John McCain died in 2018, a White House staffer lowered the flag to half-staff, a completely normal gesture for a late senator. Asset canceled this order and refused to pay tribute to McCain, only backing down after a week of criticism. That same year, Trump resisted efforts to have him visit a cemetery in France where 1,800 Americans who died during World War I are buried. He would have asked the staff, “Why should I go to this cemetery? It’s full of losers.” Last December, when director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle were brutally murdered, apparently by their son, Trump wrote a remarkably nasty message. adage that the killing was “apparently due to the anger he provoked in others because of his massive, inflexible, incurable affliction with a crippling mental illness known as TRUMP DERANGMENT SYNDROME.”
Given Trump’s historic disregard for the dead, people naturally feared the worst when Jesse Jackson died Tuesday. After all, Jackson was a left-wing Democrat and a giant of the civil rights era. Additionally, Jackson often harshly criticized Trump since the president entered politics in 2015. In 2018, Jackson blasted Trump’s refusal to condemn the racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, saying, “Donald Trump’s language has been a source of shame for our nation. In 2023, Jackson said, “Trump wants to take us back to white supremacy.”
Given Trump’s racism, it would not have been surprising if he attempted to desecrate Jackson’s memory with the same crudeness as his attacks on McCain and Reiner. But Trump took the opposite route by a long article on Truth Socialwriting: “I knew him well, long before he became president. He was a good man, with a lot of personality, courage and street smarts.” He was very gregarious – someone who really loved people! »
Certainly, after this warm opening, Trump launched into an extended variation of the tired racist trope that “I can’t be racist – some of my best friends are black.” Trump actually said it when he wrote: “Despite being falsely and consistently labeled a racist by the scoundrels and lunatics of the Radical Left, Democrats ALL, I was always happy to help Jesse along the way. » Trump then listed the acts of kindness he has performed toward Jackson and Black Americans: giving Jackson an office in Trump Tower in the 1990s, signing a criminal justice reform bill in 2018, securing funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in 2025, and supporting enterprise zones. To add a partisan twist, Trump both credited Jackson’s campaigns with paving the way for Barack Obama’s victory and claimed that Jackson hated Obama.
Beyond his message and the thanks addressed to Jackson during a speech in which he called Jackson a ‘job’ but added he was a ‘good man’ and a ‘real hero’ – so was Trump posted a dozen photos of himself with Jackson. Vice President JD Vance joined Trump in trying to tie Jackson to the president, write on X.com: “I have a close family member who voted in two presidential primaries in his lifetime. Donald Trump in 2016 and Jesse Jackson in 1988.”
Taken together, Trump and Vance’s various comments constitute a surprising attempt to steal Jackson’s legacy and turn one of America’s great left-wing populists into a MAGA ally.
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This type of grave robbing is of course common in politics. The dead have no voice and can easily be recruited under banners they would not have recognized while alive. Conservatives like Ronald Reagan have a the habit of demanding they follow in the footsteps of popular liberal leaders such as Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. Conversely, Joe Biden did the same thing by opposing Reagan’s speech supposed moderation with Trump’s extremism.
Writing on her Substack, writer Stacey Patton note There is a particular tradition of white politicians plundering the legacies of dead black radicals in order to appropriate their achievements, while watering down their challenge to the status quo:
America has a long tradition of domesticating dead black radicals. MLK is reduced to a single quote of the “content of his character” while his critiques of capitalism and militarism are buried. Frederick Douglass is reduced to bootstrap mythology as his harsh critiques of white Christianity and American hypocrisy soften. Death makes black radicalism easier to digest. Easier to control. Easier to redeploy in the service of power structures, these men have spent their lives taking on challenges.
Beyond whitewashing black radicalism, Trump clearly hopes to steal some of Jackson’s glory. Jackson was always an anti-establishment rebel, a proponent of an expansive welfare state that would overturn the status quo. This position was unpopular when Jackson ran for president in 1984 and 1988. But in the years following the 2008 global economic crisis, his brand of economic populism on behalf of a multiracial coalition became increasingly powerful: he helped pave the way not only for Obama’s 2008 campaign promising “hope and change,” but also for the policies of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani.
Trump himself presented himself as an anti-establishment politician, although he belongs to the right. By positioning himself as an opponent of traditional politics, he was able to make inroads among people of color who might ignore more conventional Republicans. In 2024, Trump failed double its share of the black vote, from 8 percent in 2020 to 15 percent.
But unlike Jackson’s, Trump’s anti-establishment stance is hollow — and many of the people who joined his column in 2024 have begun to notice. These voters appear to have been motivated by disillusionment with Biden’s presidency, including continued economic woes. But they were hardly ideologically committed to Trumpism and have recently turned against him. This is especially true for black voters. As The Washington Post reported On Wednesday, among black voters, “Trump’s favorability fell 30 percent from a year ago to as low as 13 percent last month. His work approval has dropped to 15 percent…. Her current notes are pretty much what they were before losing the 2020 presidential election.”
Trump’s rapidly declining popularity among black voters explains his strangely overflowing tributes to Jackson. Among black voters, Jackson is fondly remembered as an outsider who challenged the Democratic Party establishment and forced it to embrace economic populism. Trump claims to be Jackson’s heir, even though his own economic policies favor plutocracy. Plummeting in the polls, Trump and Vance are desperately trying to seize the legacy of the man who despised them during his lifetime. In truth, Jackson’s legacy is a rebuke to everything Trump stands for.
Damn Lord Jeet Heer is national affairs correspondent for The nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, Time of the Monsters. He also writes the monthly column “Morbid symptoms.” The author of Art lovers: the adventures of Françoise Mouly in comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: reviews, essays and profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American perspective, The guardian, The New RepublicAnd The Boston Globe.
