Source: Variety / Getty
Exonerated Five member Yusef Salaam had a word to say about the news that a grand jury in Manhattan voted Thursday to make Donald Trump the first ex-president in history to be indicted on criminal charges. (Eat your heart out, Richard Nixon!).
And when I say “a word,” I literally mean one word: “Karma.”
OK, so Salaam actually decorated his one-word response with a little set-up by including that Trump never apologized for calling for the Central Park Five’s execution after they were wrongly convicted of the beating and rape of a white female jogger in 1989—a crime for which five Black and brown teens spent years in prison before evidence exonerated them in 2002. Trump not only called for the execution of the boys who had beaten and raped no one, but he spent $85,000 on a full-page ad that ran in all four of New York’s major newspapers calling for the state to restore the death penalty so teenagers who turned out not to be guilty could be executed by the government.
“Mayor [Ed] Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,” read an excerpt from the ad. “I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer… Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will… How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits?”
Daaaamn, you would think the Central Park Five had—say—attacked police officers while storming the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to overthrow the government based on thoroughly debunked voter fraud propaganda that was spread by, well, whoever was president of the United States at the time.
Of course, some would argue that Trump can’t be faulted because he had no idea the falsely accused were, indeed, falsely accused. But, as Salaam said, Trump refused to apologize in 2019 for his loud and wrong Black youth death fantasy commercial, because, for whatever reason (*cough* *cough* racism) he still thought they were guilty.
Anyway, a lot of the fine folks on Twitter appreciated Salaam’s cut-to-the-chase response.
Not that anyone would expect an orangey-white nationalist creation like Trump to apologize for what would have been a tragic and murderous miscarriage of justice had he gotten his way. Trump is going to Trump, after all.
Let’s just see what this indictment do.