President Trump is now seeking praise for briefly scheduling a rally on Juneteenth, claiming this made it "very famous."
Trump spoke in a Wall Street Journal interview this week about Juneteenth after he received backlash for scheduling his first rally in months on that day that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States; the rally is also taking place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the 1921 Tulsa race massacre took place. Trump later pushed the rally back a day to June 20th "out of respect for this holiday."
"I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous," Trump told The Wall Street Journal. "It's actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it."
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According to the Journal, Trump in the interview "said a black Secret Service agent told him the meaning of Juneteenth" and that "he polled many people around him, none of whom had heard of Juneteenth." In an attempt to prove this point that nobody ever heard of the holiday, he even stopped the interview with the Journal to ask an aide if she had. He apparently didn't get the answer he expected, as the aide pointed out that the White House put out a statement on Juneteenth last year; in fact, the Journal notes the White House has done so during every year of Trump's presidency.
"Oh really? We put out a statement? The Trump White House put out a statement?" he said. "Ok, ok. Good."
As CNN's Daniel Dale points out, this is just the latest instance of Trump asserting that most people hadn't heard of something not especially obscure, including once claiming that "nobody ever heard of the word emolument before" and that "few people have ever even heard of" a Category 5 hurricane.
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