CNN Tonight host Don Lemon was once perceived as a questionable figure in the Black community. But ever since this whole Trump presidency thing happened, the 51-year-old seems to be more down for the brown than ever before.
After news of President Donald Trump reportedly referring to Haiti, El Salvador and African nations as “s**thole countries” during an Oval Office meeting circulated on Thursday, Lemon went full-on real talk with viewers.
“This is CNN Tonight. I’m Don Lemon. The President of the United States is a racist,” Lemon said in his in his opening remarks. “A lot of us already knew that.”
An exhausted Lemon then went on to say that, as with most of us, he can no longer conjure up outrage towards the president.
“Those comments are frankly disgusting,” the journalist said. “They’re not shocking, not even really surprising, because this is who Donald Trump is—this is what he thinks.”
Thursday night’s show wasn’t the first instance in which Lemon used his platform to call the president out for his callousness.
After the president told the widow of a Gold Star military sergeant La David Johnson that her late husband “knew what he signed up for,” Lemon read his open letter to the president in which he pleaded with Trump to understand the error of his ways.
But as Lemon and countless others have realized, 45 is not one who can be reasoned with.
Which may be why in Thursday night’s show, Lemon has stopped talking to the president and instead to those who continue to champion him.
“For years, I and others have been trying to tell you, the American people, that this man has been exhibiting bigoted behavior,” Lemon said in his closing statements. “I’ve asked him about it a number of times and he denied, but kept up the racist rhetoric throughout the campaign and now while he’s in the White House.”
“It’s more important to be strategic than outraged…I’m tired of being outraged,” he continued. “Here’s why I’m not outraged: People of color warned you. You called us racists or race-baiters.”
