Donald Trump Tells the Truth

We interrupt your Facebook scrolling, Candy Crush game, tweets or whatever you were doing (although we can’t imagine what you’d be doing on the internet besides reading The Root) to bring you this important announcement:

News agencies across the country are reporting the collective, nationwide shock at the unthinkable incident that happened on Fox News on Sunday night when President Donald Trump briefly—and perhaps accidentally—said something that was actually true.

That is not a misprint. You read it correctly. Although there is some speculation that it might have been a mistake or a glitch in the matrix, a guest on a Fake News—I mean, Fox News—show uttered a nonfiction statement that was based in reality.

 

During a one-on-one interview, the conservative icon and spokesman for white America Bill O’Reilly engaged Trump on the Great Pumpkin president’s schoolboy crush on Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. When O’Reilly pressed the comb-over-in-chief about Putin’s propensity for violence and history of killing Russian citizens, Trump responded, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think—our country’s so innocent? You think our country’s so innocent?”

While the entirety of true-blue, red-state America was immediately thunderstruck with shock and disgust, the statement also flabbergasted black America to its core—but for a different reason. The melanated watchers all simultaneously had the same subconscious thought:

“Damn! Donald Trump just told the truth!”

Every mainstream news outlet in the country is currently running a version of ginned-up, patriotic outrage screaming, “How dare he equate us with a Russian strongman government!” Trump’s response startled the contingent of Fox News watchers for his blasphemous comparison of a communist dictatorship to the beacon of freedom and justice that is the United States. Meanwhile, most black people quietly whispered to themselves:

“He’s kinda right, though.”

Yes, it is true that Putin’s Russia is an autocratic, unyielding government that spies on its own and muffles any kind of dissent. Sometimes they even kill their own citizens. Americans don’t believe their government would ever do that.

Until they find out how police departments sent undercover agents to spy on and disrupt Black Lives Matter protests



around the country. Until they discover the not-so-secret drone surveillance program the city of Baltimore used to watch its citizens during and after the Freddie Gray uprising. Until they read the unclassified FBI COINTELPRO files that say, “The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of black-nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and supporters.”

Yes, we’ve got a lot of killers.

We know that the FBI sent a letter to Martin Luther King Jr. threatening to blackmail him unless he killed himself. We remember how police murdered the most prominent Chicago Black Panther by firing between 82 and 99 shots into 21-year-old Fred Hampton’s tiny apartment while he slept with his pregnant wife. We’ve seen the declassified directive from J. Edgar Hoover to prevent the rise of a black messiah who could unify the black movement.

We could delve into how the woman who killed Emmett Till recently confessed after 60 years, or how Trump dismissively ordered a drone strike over dinner last week that killed bystanders and children in Yemen, or how no officer was convicted of murder or manslaughter for using lethal force in the line of duty (even when the victim was unarmed) from 2005 to 2015—but there’s no need for all that pesky evidence.

Trust me, we’re not so innocent.

There is a trite saying that “even a broken clock is right twice a day.” Today media outlets will blast headlines and fill timelines with opinions and perspectives dissecting Trump’s disastrous interview. For the most part, they will be correct. He did have an unseasoned view on foreign policy, domestic policy, tax policy, fiscal policy and ... well ... policy in general. But amid his mountain of “alternative facts” (because there apparently is some unspoken rule that no one in the mainstream press can call a liar a “liar”), empty equivocations and dunderheaded stumbling, the douchebag Diet Hitler actually said something that was factually correct. The U.S. government may not be Putin-level, radiation-poisoning-with-an-umbrella sinister, but no, America is not so innocent.

Let’s just hope and pray that—like the broken clock—Trump has one more factual statement to fill his daily truth quota. If he does, then we might be shocked.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled internet.