Does Donald Trump Know Frederick Douglass Is Dead?

This is the full transcript of Trump’s remarks on black history month, given this morning:

Well, the election, it came out really well. Next time we’ll triple the number or quadruple it. We want to get it over 51, right? At least 51.

Well this is Black History Month, so this is our little breakfast, our little get-together. Hi Lynn, how are you? Just a few notes. During this month, we honor the tremendous history of African-Americans throughout our country. Throughout the world, if you really think about it, right? And their story is one of unimaginable sacrifice, hard work, and faith in America. I’ve gotten a real glimpse—during the campaign, I’d go around with Ben to a lot of different places I wasn’t so familiar with. They’re incredible people. And I want to thank Ben Carson, who’s gonna be heading up HUD. That’s a big job. That’s a job that’s not only housing, but it’s mind and spirit. Right, Ben? And you understand, nobody’s gonna be better than Ben.

Last month, we celebrated the life of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., whose incredible example is unique in American history. You read all about Dr. Martin Luther King a week ago when somebody said I took the statue out of my office. It turned out that that was fake news. Fake news. The statue is cherished, it’s one of the favorite things in the—and we have some good ones. We have Lincoln, and we have Jefferson, and we have Dr. Martin Luther King. But they said the statue, the bust of Martin Luther King, was taken out of the office. And it was never even touched. So I think it was a disgrace, but that’s the way the press is. Very unfortunate.

I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things. Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I noticed. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and millions more black Americans who made America what it is today. Big impact.

I’m proud to honor this heritage and will be honoring it more and more. The folks at the table in almost all cases have been great friends and supporters. Darrell—I met Darrell when he was defending me on television. And the people that were on the other side of the argument didn’t have a chance, right? And Paris has done an amazing job in a very hostile CNN community. He’s all by himself. You’ll have seven people, and Paris. And I’ll take Paris over the seven. But I don’t watch CNN, so I don’t get to see you as much as I used to. I don’t like watching fake news. But Fox has treated me very nice. Wherever Fox is, thank you.

We’re gonna need better schools and we need them soon. We need more jobs, we need better wages, a lot better wages. We’re gonna work very hard on the inner city. Ben is gonna be doing that, big league. That’s one of the big things that you’re gonna be looking at. We need safer communities and we’re going to do that with law enforcement. We’re gonna make it safe. We’re gonna make it much better than it is right now. Right now it’s terrible, and I saw you talking about it the other night, Paris, on something else that was really—you did a fantastic job the other night on a very unrelated show.

I’m ready to do my part, and I will say this: We’re gonna work together. This is a great group, this is a group that’s been so special to me. You really helped me a lot. If you remember I wasn’t going to do well with the African-American community, and after they heard me speaking and talking about the inner city and lots of other things, we ended up getting—and I won’t go into details—but we ended up getting substantially more than other candidates who had run in the past years. And now we’re gonna take that to new levels. I want to thank my television star over here—Omarosa’s actually a very nice person, nobody knows that. I don’t want to destroy her reputation but she’s a very good person, and she’s been helpful right from the beginning of the campaign, and I appreciate it. I really do. Very special.

So I want to thank everybody for being here.

First, note that Trump starts by talking about that percentage of the black electorate he won. I’m sorry, but unless black history month is actually all about Donald Trump, that’s not relevant to black history month. Note his statement that he’s planning to get 51% of the black vote in 2020. There is no way in hell that will happen. Long-established voting patterns do not change that quickly, that fast.

At the end of his address Trump returns to his share of the black vote—again. He claims that  after giving speeches about the inner city, he won “substantially more” of the black vote than other candidates from previous years. I’m going to be charitable and assume he means other Republican candidates—and yet, he is flat wrong. The percentage of the black vote he received is smack in the middle of with the percentage of the black vote Republicans have been receiving for decades—except when they’re running against a black candidate. In other words, he’s not the outlier, McCain and Romney were.

Also, I have black friends (as cliche as that sounds), and they were mad at all get-out at how Trump talked about the inner cities. And yet Trump is somehow deluded enough to think that his comments bought him votes? That’s some bubble.

Okay, next, I just went through the speech line-by-line and counted how many lines Trump spent talking about what topics. Out of 33 total lines (my screen width may differ from yours, so bear with me), he spent 7 speaking extremely generically about black history. He spent 7 talking about how awesome his campaign was, 4 praising individual people in the audience for being nice to him, 2 talking up Ben Carson and his HUD position, 4 repeating generic campaign promises, and 9 lambasting the media for being unfair to him.

That’s right, Trump gave a black history month address in which he spent more time berating the media than he did talking about black history. In fact, only 20% of his address had anything to do with black history month. The rest was about berating people he doesn’t like (because they’re mean to him) and praising people he does like (because they’re nice to him).

But that’s not the important question. Here’s the important question—does Donald Trump know that Frederick Douglass died in 1895? Notice how he talks about him:

Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I noticed.

Note the tense? Sub in another name and read the sentence again. Would you know that the sentence was about someone who accomplished things a century and a half ago? If asked, could Trump outline some of the things Douglass did? Sean Spicer, his press secretary, sure couldn’t.

Obviously, whether Trump knows that Douglass died over a century ago is not the biggest problem with this speech. Still, asking the question allows me to distract myself for a moment from the reality that we have a president who cannot speak for two minutes, on anything, without lambasting the media and making everything all about him.

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