Juneteenth isn't a real holiday, according to Trump
He wants to get rid of it, but he'd no doubt consider a national celebration for his birthday
By Sam Bellamy
Donald Trump is passing up few opportunities to insult or outright harm African Americans in his second term, and this week’s Juneteenth celebration was no different.
“Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed,” our stable genius posted Thursday on his misnamed Truth Social. “The workers don’t want it either! Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year. It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Trump has a long and well-documented animus toward people of color, but his loathing has reached new lows since his return to the White House.
Through executive orders of questionable legality, Trump has obliterated diversity, equity and inclusion policies at workplaces nationwide. He’s successfully pushed government institutions and schools to minimize the stories of slavery and the civil rights movement and erase mention of many of the contributions of black Americans to our nation’s success. He even blamed a deadly plane crash in Washington D.C. on DEI – without absolutely no proof – and prodded other officials to do the same.
In 2020, Trump drew criticism for scheduling his first campaign rally since the pandemic on Juneteenth in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where white supremacists massacred black residents in 1921. The number of deaths is disputed, but the total could be as high as 300. Hundreds more black people were driven from town as their white neighbors burned 35 square blocks of a business district known as Black Wall Street.
The timing of the rally was especially tone deaf because much of the nation was still protesting the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Trump’s campaign rescheduled the event for the next day, and he bragged to the Wall Street Journal that he’d just popularized Juneteenth. “I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous,” he boasted. “It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.”
Well, millions of black Americans – and quite a few people of other backgrounds – had. Communities across the country had been celebrating the day, in small and large ways, since a Union general arrived in Texas on June 19,1865 and informed African Americans that they were free and the Civil War was over.
Trump claimed he’d asked people around the White House – few of whom were black – if they were familiar with Juneteenth and they all said no. This, despite the fact that it has been a holiday or subject of an official observance in 47 states and the District of Columbia for many years.
When informed that his administration had issued a proclamation honoring Juneteenth each year since he’d become president in 2017, Trump expressed surprise but said that was “good.”
Whatever regard he had for the day disappeared, though, when President Biden signed legislation in 2021 declaring June 19 a national holiday. In Trump’s simple mind, if Biden (or Obama) had anything to do with something, that something is automatically bad.
In the years since Biden made the national holiday official, government offices have closed and mail delivery has paused on Juneteenth, but most private businesses – including retail giants like Walmart – remained open for business.
Despite Trump’s claims, “$BILLIONS OF DOLLARS” are not lost each year because the holiday. And it defies reason that any worker, anywhere, complains about a paid day off.
A congressional act would be required to rescind the day’s status as a federal holiday, but a little thing like the law rarely stands in the orange man’s way.
Trump no doubt would be happy to swap out Juneteenth for a different national holiday in June – on the 14th, which happens to be both Flag Day and his birthday, as we were recently reminded with an expensive military parade.
Rep. Claudia Tenney, a Republican from New York, dutifully introduced a bill a few months ago to declare the 14th a holiday.
“No modern president has been more pivotal for our country than Donald J. Trump. As both our 45th and 47th President, he is the most consequential President in modern American history, leading our country at a time of great international and domestic turmoil. From brokering the historic Abraham Accords to championing the largest tax relief package in American history, his impact on the nation is undeniable,” she wrote in her legislation.
Fortunately, the bill is languishing in committee.
While Trump was rage-tweeting about black people getting their own holiday, Biden was in Galveston, Texas – the scene of that Union general’s announcement – at a celebration commemorating the day.
“Juneteenth is a day of liberation, a day of remembrance and a day of celebration,” Biden said. “Juneteenth represents both the long and hard night of slavery and subjugation and the promise of joyful morning to come.”
He also added at one point, “We need to be honest about our history” and acknowledge “the moral stain” of slavery.
There was no official proclamation from the White House noting the day.
At a press briefing that morning, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt snittily informed reporters that she wasn’t aware of any plans to acknowledge the day.
"I'm not tracking his signature on a proclamation today,” she said. “I know this is a federal holiday. I want to thank all of you for showing up to work. We are certainly here. We're working 24/7 right now."
In Galveston, Biden had work of a different kind in mind, telling the crowd, “We need to keep pushing America forward.”
“Let’s get the hell to work and get more done,” he said.