By refusing to resign, Kevin de León gives anti-Blackness a pass and we are all left asking two questions: 1) What does this say about the Black/Native peoples of the United States? And 2) What does it say about Donald Trump’s presidency?
At around 2 am on Tuesday, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted a picture of his dinner with his wife and 10-year old son, Eric, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.
Don Jr. captioned that picture with the words, “My son Eric and I went to the Lincoln Memorial, and I’m so proud of everything he’s achieved in just eight years of being in this country.”
And that’s where this story gets really good.
It got really good because, in response to the President Trump Sr. post on Twitter, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders issued a statement claiming that Trump Jr. misspoke when he said he went to the “Lincoln Memorial”.
In reality, there is no monument in Washington DC called “the Lincoln Memorial”.
It is the Washington Monument, which is located on the National Mall.
The Washington Monument’s inscription reads:
“dedicated in commemoration of the progress and security of our Country during the past quarter century.”
So is Don Jr. trying to distance himself from his tweet, or is his tweet deliberately misleading the public?
Is Don Jr. trying to give the public the impression he went to “the Lincoln Memorial?”
The thing is, Don Jr. did go to the Lincoln Memorial, he just did not go to the actual Lincoln Memorial, which is located on the National Mall in Washington DC.
When President Obama hosted American Indian Tribal Nations in Washington in 2015, he went to the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Ronald Regan Memorial.
In September 2015, just before the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, Senator Tom Cotton introduced a Congressional resolution condemning the Dakota Access Pipeline. He said,
“I was deeply disappointed to learn that the State Department of the United States had approved the Dakota Access Pipeline despite its severe challenges and the
