Why Trump Is Trying to Steal Jesse Jackson’s Glory

Donald Trump enjoys speaking ill of the dead. He is instinctively boorish and hates to be tied down by the conventional rules of civility that are predicated on the ideal of human equality. When John McCain died in 2018, a White House staffer had the flag lowered to half-mast, a perfectly normal gesture to a late senator. Trump countermanded that order and refused to pay tribute to McCain, only backtracking after a week of criticism. That same year, Trump resisted efforts to get him to visit a cemetery in France where 1,800 Americans who died in the First World War are buried. He reportedly asked staffers, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” Last December, when the director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, were brutally murdered, seemingly by their son, Trump wrote a remarkably nasty post saying that the killing was “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”

Given Trump’s history of disdain for the dead, one naturally feared for the worst when Jesse Jackson passed away on Tuesday. After all, Jackson was a left-wing Democrat and a giant of the civil rights era. Further, Jackson had often bluntly criticized Trump since the president entered politics in 2015. In 2018, Jackson lambasted Trump’s refusal to condemn the racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, saying, “The language of Donald Trump has been a source of shame for our nation.” In 2023, Jackson said, “Trump wants to pull us back into white supremacy.”

Given Trump’s racism, it wouldn’t have been surprising if he tried to desecrate Jackson’s memory with the same crassness of his attacks on McCain and Reiner. But Trump took the opposite route in a long post on Truth Social, writing, “I knew him well, long before becoming President. He was a good man, with lots of personality, grit, and ‘street smarts.’ He was very gregarious – Someone who truly loved people!”

To be sure, after this warm opening, Trump went into an extended variation of the tired racist trope that “I can’t be racist—some of my best friends are Black.” Trump effectively said this when he wrote, “Despite the fact that I am falsely and consistently called a Racist by the Scoundrels and Lunatics on the Radical Left, Democrats ALL, it was always my pleasure to help Jesse along the way.” Trump then listed off acts of kindness he did for Jackson and Black Americans: giving Jackson office space in Trump Tower in the 1990s, signing a criminal justice reform bill in 2018, securing funding for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in 2025 and supporting enterprise zones. To add a partisan twist, Trump both credited Jackson’s campaigns for preparing the path for Barack Obama’s victory and asserted that Jackson hated Obama.

Beyond his post and a shout-out to Jackson during a speech—in which he called Jackson a “piece of work” but added that he was a “good man” and a “real hero”—Trump also posted a dozen photos of himself with Jackson. Vice President JD Vance joined Trump in trying to link Jackson with the president, writing on X.com: “I have a close family member who voted in two presidential primaries in her entire life. Donald Trump in 2016 and Jesse Jackson in 1988.”

Taken together, the various comments by Trump and Vance add up to a surprising attempt to steal Jackson’s legacy and turn one of America’s great left-wing populists into a MAGA ally.

This kind of grave-robbing is of course common in politics. The dead have no voice and can easily be recruited under banners that they would not have recognized when alive. Conservatives like Ronald Reagan have a habit of claiming they are following in the footsteps of popular liberal leaders such as Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. Conversely, Joe Biden did the same thing when he contrasted Reagan’s supposed moderation with Trump’s extremism.

Writing on her Substack, the writer Stacey Patton noted there is a particular tradition of white politicians looting the legacy of dead Black radicals in order to appropriate their achievement, while also watering down their challenge to the status quo:

America has a long tradition of domesticating dead Black radicals. MLK gets flattened into one “content of their character” quote while his critiques of capitalism and militarism get buried. Frederick Douglass gets reduced to bootstrap mythology while his searing critiques of white Christianity and American hypocrisy get softened. Death makes Black radicalism easier to digest. Easier to control. Easier to redeploy in service of power structures those men spent their lives challenging.

Beyond whitewashing Black radicalism, Trump is clearly hoping to steal some of Jackson’s glory. Jackson was a lifelong anti-system rebel, an advocate for an expansive welfare state that would upturn the status quo. This stance was unpopular when Jackson ran for the presidency in 1984 and ’88. But in the years following the global economic meltdown of 2008, his style of economic populism on behalf of a multiracial coalition has become increasingly potent: It helped pave the way not only for Obama’s 2008 campaign promising “hope and change” but also the politics of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani.

Trump himself has run as an anti-system politician, albeit one of the right. By positioning himself as an opponent of traditional politics, he was able to make inroads among people of color who might ignore more conventional Republicans. In 2024, Trump nearly doubled his share of the Black vote, from 8 percent in 2020 to 15 percent.