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The Pretender with "his" African-Americans (sic). Getty pool photo.

Our ignoble Trumpster Fire launched Black History Month on Wednesday about as elegantly as you'd expect. At a supremely awkward breakfast meeting, he ramblingly introduced the two (awful) black people he knows, whined again about CNN, boasted/lied about how many African-Americans (aka 8%) voted for him because their lives in "the inner city" are all "terrible," vaguely and vacuously mentioned Martin Luther King only to accuse the press for the 874th time of lying about that statue he didn't move and to praise the new African-American Museum he had nothing whatsoever to do with as a place "where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things," and in a final, triumphant demolition of reason and history, declared the great 19th century orator, abolitionist and freedom-fighter Frederick Douglass, dead now these 121 years, as "an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice."

WTF? said, basically, everyone. Twitter, of course, was on it. Christian Schneider: "Trump not making any predictions on the Super Bowl until he sees if Frederick Douglass is healthy enough to play." It was suggested that Trump, well-known BFF of "the blacks," had understandably confused Douglass with Morgan Freeman - wide nose - or maybe Michael Jordan, or was so busy in sixth grade history class thinking up good words, the best words, ever, that he missed the part where Douglass died in 1895. It didn't help when his so-called Press Secretary Sean Spicer, asked about the comment by a reporter desperately struggling to keep a straight face, said this: “I think there’s contribution. I think he wants to highlight the contributions that he has made, and I think through a lot of the actions and statements that he’s going to make, I think the contributions of Frederick Douglass will become more and more.” That's verbatim. In a final tribute, Douglass himself rose from the grave to start his own Twitter account, using the Trumpian syntax; it mysteriously vanished a few hours later. Too uppity? SAD.

It also didn't help when some observers inevitably compared the Cheetolini's vapidity to the very real eloquence of Obama at the Museum's opening: "We've railed against injustice for decade upon decade, a lifetime of struggle and progress and enlightenment that we see etched in Frederick Douglass's mighty, leonine gaze..." Douglass himself, even more powerfully, puts the Idiot Pretender to shame. Deemed by some the world's greatest orator, Douglass was born a slave in Maryland in 1817. After escaping to the North in 1838, he settled in Massachusetts, where he became a leader of the anti-slavery movement. He eventually bought his own freedom and moved to Rochester, N.Y., where he published an abolitionist newspaper, ran the local underground railroad and worked to desegregate the public schools.

Douglass was known across the country for his fierce, incisive, deeply radical speeches, which pulled no punches. Among his subjects was immigration, which he considered among the most basic human rights: "They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are external, universal, and indestructible. Among these, is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all and to all alike." In one of his most famous speeches, on July 4, 1852, he railed against the hypocrisy of a nation celebrating freedom and independence with parades and platitudes while "four million humans were being kept as slaves...Above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions (and their) chains, heavy and grievous...I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! This Fourth of July is yours, not mine." Then as now, he was plain truth speaking to mendacious power.

"What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?... To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns...mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour...It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced."

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