President Donald Trump found an interesting way to pay tribute to late singer Aretha Franklin on Thursday.
Trump was about to attend a Cabinet meeting when he took time to honor the “Queen of Soul,” who died from pancreatic cancer in Detroit on Thursday.
“I begin today by expressing the condolences to the family of a person I knew well,” Trump said, “She’s worked for me on numerous occasions, she was terrific–Aretha Franklin–on her passing.”
Many were confused by what Trump meant when he said Franklin worked for him, but according to The Independent, the president may have been referring to when she performed at one of his Atlantic City casinos in the 1980s and when she attended the Trump Tower grand opening in 1997.
On Thursday, he tweeted about Franklin’s death, calling her a “wonderful gift from God.”
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1030116078125568006
Franklin received heartwarming condolences from former President Barack Obama.
“Aretha helped define the American experience. In her voice, we could feel our history, all of it and in every shade—our power and our pain, our darkness and our light, our quest for redemption and our hard-won respect. May the Queen of Soul rest in eternal peace,” Obama wrote.
Aretha helped define the American experience. In her voice, we could feel our history, all of it and in every shade—our power and our pain, our darkness and our light, our quest for redemption and our hard-won respect. May the Queen of Soul rest in eternal peace. pic.twitter.com/bfASqKlLc5
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 16, 2018
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Teddy is a multimedia journalist who serves as the culture and political writer for EBONY. His work has appeared in NBC's Owned and Operated stations, as well as DNAInfo, which covered local neighborhood news in New York City. He received his Masters in Journalism from the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY in 2017.