President Donald Trump on Wednesday used a White House Black History Month reception to defend his record on race, specifically affirm he is not a racist and rattle off a list of Black athletes and other African-American celebrities he claimed as “friends.”
After introducing his only Black cabinet member — Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner — alongside Turner’s predecessor from his first term, former neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson, Trump brought up White House Pardon Czar Alice Johnson to speak, followed by former Fox News commentator turned Justice Department lawyer Leo Terrell, who he called a “special guy,” and Alveda King, the anti-abortion activist and niece of the late civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Trump then began to call out more athletes and entertainers whom he counts among his “friends,” including rapper Nikki Minaj and a succession of boxers, including ex-world champion and convicted rapist Mike Tyson.
“Mike Tyson, Boy, I tell you, Mike has been loyal to me. Whenever they come out, they say, ‘Trump’s a racist’ … Mike Tyson goes, ‘He’s not a racist, he’s my friend,’” Trump said.
“He’s been there from the beginning, good times and bad. But Mike Tyson’s a great guy, and he was so loyal. Always been loyal.”
Of Minaj, the president praised the rapper’s “so beautiful skin” and her signature acrylic fingernails while claiming to be unsure if they are real.
“I said, Nikki, are they real? She said she didn’t want to get into that, but she was so beautiful,” Trump said.
The president also listed off several former NFL players, including failed Georgia Senate candidate turned Ambassador to the Bahamas Herschel Walker, the late Hall of Fame running back and actor Jim Brown, and Lawrence Taylor, the former New York Giants standout whose Hall-of-Fame career was marred by drug problems.
Trump called Taylor “a great friend” while boasting that his own golf skills are superior to the former linebacker’s.
The president’s appearance alongside his most prominent Black boosters comes just a week after he sparked outrage by reposting a video to social media that showed Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces superimposed onto apes in a jungle, swaying side to side and smiling as the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played in the background.
The clip, which was up for 12 hours before being pulled from the president’s social media feed, was met with disgust by numerous politicians, television hosts and other high-profile figures.
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, a close ally of Trump’s and the upper chamber’s only Black Republican member, was one of a number of GOP officials to accuse the president of crossing the line.
“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” Scott wrote on X. “The President should remove it.”
Trump has a long history of attacking the Obamas, often using incendiary rhetoric, which has drawn accusations of racism.
Prior to his entry into politics, Trump repeatedly promoted the unsubstantiated claim that Obama was born in Kenya, demanding he show the public his birth certificate. In 2011, Obama released his long-form birth certificate proving he’d been born in Hawaii. During a news conference, he decried Trump as a “carnival barker.”
Trump finally acknowledged that the former Democratic president was born in the United States shortly before the 2016 election.
Since returning to office after winning the 2024 election over former vice president Kamala Harris, Trump and his top aides have embarked on a crusade to eliminate anti-discrimination regulations and gut programs across government that had been intended to benefit Black Americans while pushing schools, universities and other educational institutions to change their history curricula by eliminating criticisms of slavery in the United States.
At the Defense Department, Trump-appointed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has purged some of the military’s highest-ranking Black officers under the guise of eliminating “diversity, equity and inclusion” supporters while instituting grooming standards which critics say unfairly target Black service members and could force many to be discharged.
Trump’s anti-diversity crusade drew a rebuke from a federal judge in Pennsylvania on Monday when she ordered the administration to restore all mentions of slavery that had been removed from an exhibit at Philadelphia’s President’s House on Independence Mall.
Days earlier, the National Parks Service had removed any mention of slavery and all information about enslaved people who lived at the site, citing the president’s executive order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history” at the nation’s museums, parks and landmarks.
The order has underpinned the administration’s sweeping efforts to sanitize or remove entirely from public view the nation’s history of enslavement.
It directed his administration to review the nation’s museums and historical sites that depict “founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”
As a result, several exhibits about the brutality of slavery and the nation’s legacy of injustice and fight for civil rights were removed.
The president has also railed against the Smithsonian Institution for focusing on “how bad slavery was” instead of the “brightness” or “future” of America and threatened to pull federal funding from museums that “portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
