Trump Issues Awful MLK Day Statement After Uproar Over His Silence

President Trump issued a flimsy, ill-defined proclamation on Martin Luther King Jr. Day at 8:15 p.m., after hours of silence—and criticism from the NAACP.

“Dr. King pioneered a movement that would go on to triumphantly reaffirm our national conviction that every man, woman, and child is endowed by their Creator with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the statement read. “As President, I am steadfastly committed to ensuring that our country will always be guided by the same principles that Dr. King defended throughout his life and to upholding the timeless truth that our rights are not granted by government but endowed by Almighty God.” 

Trump went on to note that he had “proudly ordered the declassification of documents related to [King’s] assassination,” even as the family actively disapproved of how he went about releasing them at the time.  

Notably, the statement made no mention of racial justice or African Americans.

NAACP National President Derrick Johnson was unconvinced by the president’s proclamation, stating that “Donald Trump has zero interest in uniting this country or recognizing its history and diversity.”

“Instead, he wants to pit us against each other so that we don’t pay attention to the fact that his net worth has more than doubled while families lose their health care and access to essential services,” Johnson continued. 

Trump’s purposefully unspecific proclamation is yet another example of American politicians whitewashing, sanitizing, or outright denigrating the legacy of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a man who was surveilled, slandered, and eventually killed for organizing against violent racial discrimination and economic inequality of African Americans.

“We renew our resolve to honor our heritage, reclaim our freedom, and recommit to the truth that America is, was, and forever will be a great Nation,” Trump wrote near the end of his proclamation, using verbiage that had nothing to do with MLK Day. “On this day, I encourage all Americans to recommit themselves to Dr. King’s dream by engaging in acts of service to others, to their community, and to our Nation.”

The president appears ready and willing to turn on some of America’s greatest allies in his quest to conquer Greenland.

In a frenetic string of posts to Truth Social late Sunday night, Donald Trump skewered Britain and France, and released private messages sent to him by French President Emmanuel Macron and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

Trump claimed that Britain was acting with “GREAT STUPIDITY” in its Chagos Islands deal, which would return the islands—a vestige of the empire’s colonies—to Mauritius. Despite previously supporting the exchange, Trump suddenly claimed that handing over the island of Diego Garcia, which hosts a U.S. military base, would appear weak to global forces such as China and Russia, and add to a “very long line of National Security reasons why Greenland has to be acquired.”

In another needless dig at America’s strategic partners, Trump also put Macron and Rutte on blast, publishing screenshots of private messages the European leaders sent to him in an attempt to redirect his energies away from annexing Greenland.

“I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland,” Macron wrote, according to Trump’s posts. “Let us try to build great things.”

That was, apparently, insulting enough to Trump to warrant a public callout that effectively calls into question the security of any exchange with the current U.S. leader.

Continuing his breathless digital rant, Trump shared a picture of himself in the Oval Office beside a poster board of the Western hemisphere—in which the U.S., Canada, Greenland, and Venezuela were colored in with the American flag. In another post, Trump shared an AI-generated image of himself planting a U.S. flag in rocky terrain next to a sign reading “Greenland: U.S. Territory, Est. 2026.”

Meanwhile, while speaking with reporters earlier the same night, Trump opened his arms to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, whom he invited to join his “Board of Peace,” an idea he floated in September as part of a 20-point peace plan to control Gaza.

“Yeah, he’s been invited,” Trump said.

The Department of Homeland Security appears to have just made up the craziest excuse for terrorizing a U.S. citizen with no criminal record.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were caught on camera Sunday dragging a elderly grandfather out into the snowy streets of St. Paul, Minnesota, wearing nothing but his basketball shorts, a blanket draped over his shoulders—and a pair of handcuffs.

DHS released a statement Monday claiming that ICE had been conducting a “targeted operation” to detain two convicted sex offenders. “The US citizen lives with these two convicted sex offenders at the site of the operation. The individual refused to be fingerprinted or facially ID’d. He matched the description of the targets,” the statement said.

But the family of ChongLy “Scott” Thao told a very different story, according to journalist Marisa Kabas.

“[Thao] does not live with, nor has he ever lived with, the individuals DHS claims were targets of this operation. The only people residing at the home are Mr. Thao, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his young grandson,” the family said in a statement. “They do not know the individuals DHS references.

“ICE agents did not present a warrant, did not ask for identification, and nevertheless forcibly entered the home with weapons drawn,” the statement said. “Mr. Thao went willingly with ICE, despite knowing he had done nothing wrong.”

One family member, Louansee Moua, wrote in a post on Facebook Sunday that agents pointed a gun at Thao’s daughter-in-law’s head during the chaotic arrest. Thao was driven around, questioned, and fingerprinted before being returned home.

The family’s statement said that dragging Thao half-naked into 12-degree weather was “unnecessary, degrading, and deeply traumatizing.”

This incident comes just days after one St. Paul resident warned neighbors that ICE agents had begun asking people to identify where Hmong and other Asian families live, as Donald Trump’s door-to-door immigration enforcement campaign continues to terrorize the Twin Cities.

Virginia’s Democratic-controlled legislature just got one step closer to victory in the battle against Donald Trump’s gerrymandering scheme.

The commonwealth’s Senate passed an amendment Friday that would allow the state to redraw its congressional map before the upcoming midterm elections, potentially netting Democrats, who already control six of the state’s 11 districts, an additional three or four seats.

The measure, which will amend Virginia’s Constitution to allow lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional map if another state does the same outside of the typical decennial cycle, can now be slated to appear on a special election ballot sometime before April 16. If voters pass the amendment, that gives Democrats a major step up come November.

Earlier this month, Trump told Republican lawmakers that he needed the party to maintain control of the House and Senate in order to avoid being impeached.

Unfortunately for him, this seems increasingly unavoidable, as in a typical midterm cycle, the presidential party pretty consistently loses ground. Those basic odds, coupled with Trump’s dismal approval rating and Democratic candidates’ growing momentum is a particularly bad sign for the president, who has started babbling about potentially cancelling the midterm elections altogether.

So far, five red states have redrawn their congressional maps at the behest of Trump in order to hand a potential nine seats to the Republican Party: Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Utah. California also revamped its district lines to hand five seats back to the Democrats.

A Reagan-appointed federal judge says the Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian activists is an “unconstitutional conspiracy.”

U.S. District Judge William Young, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1985, criticized Trump’s draconian crackdown on people like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, whose only crimes were being vocal supporters of Palestine, while announcing his plans to issue an order to prevent those kinds of targeted deportations from happening again.

“I find it breathtaking that I have been compelled on the evidence to find the conduct of such high-level officers of our government—Cabinet secretaries—conspired to infringe the First Amendment rights of people with such rights here in the United States,” Young said, alluding to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “These Cabinet secretaries have failed in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution.”

Young even compared the administration’s larger deportation policy to people catching and returning enslaved African Americans under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

“I’ve asked myself why—how did this happen? How could our own government, the highest officials in our government, seek to infringe the rights of people lawfully here in the United States? And I’ve come to believe that there’s a concept of freedom here that I don’t understand,” he said at the same hearing. “The record in this case convinces me that these high officials, and I include the president of the United States, have a fearful view of freedom.”

Young plans on releasing a formal ruling sometime next week.

“We cast around the word ‘authoritarian,’” he said. “I don’t, in this context, treat that in a pejorative sense, and I use it carefully, but it’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone, everyone in Article II is going to toe the line absolutely.”