One of Donald Trump’s most loyal MAGA allies says the president is definitely and totally not racist because he used to call Michael Jackson a friend.
“These things that he’s a racist and he’s a Nazi and he’s this and that—I mean, Donald Trump, all this stuff’s coming out now,” UFC chief Dana White told The New Yorker.
“You know, the Michael movie just came out,” he went on. “You see all these videos now popping up of Trump defending Michael Jackson and the type of person that he was and that Michael Jackson was around his children and around his family a lot.”
New Yorker editor David Remnick was quick to push back on White’s comments. “Wait a minute, Dana,” he said. “Michael Jackson—as talented as he was, as brilliant as he was, was a deeply, deeply flawed human being, to say the least.”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” White said of the child abuse allegations that emerged against Jackson during his lifetime. “I can tell you the president had a very good relationship with Michael Jackson and had Michael Jackson around his kids all the time.”
“You know, defended him when that stuff was going down,” he went on. “So to call the guy a racist is crazy. He’s not a racist.”
It’s true that the president did maintain something of a friendly relationship with Michael Jackson. Their paths are thought to have first crossed in 1988, when Trump attended Jackson’s “Bad World Tour” concert at Madison Square Garden, and Jackson later went on to live in Trump Tower in New York.
Trump also defended Jackson from child sexual abuse accusations that first emerged against the singer in the 1990s and continued to dog his career right up to his death in 2009. The president stood by Jackson even as the scandals have marred his legacy, posting in 2015 an earlier photo of them together in which he described the pop star as “very misunderstood” and “a great talent.”
It is also true that Trump has faced repeated and often serious accusations of racism throughout both his time in office and during his earlier career as a real estate mogul and reality TV star.
The Justice Department, in 1973, in fact sued one of Trump’s companies for allegedly refusing to rent to Black tenants and lying about apartment availability.
Trump later took out newspaper ads in 1989 urging the death penalty for five Black and Latino teenagers after they were wrongfully accused of assaulting a white female jogger in Central Park. They became known as the Central Park Five and were eventually exonerated.
A number of former Trump employees alleged discriminatory treatment of Black workers at his companies throughout the 1990s, including claims that managers at Trump’s casinos would shoo Black staff from certain rooms when high-profile clients visited the venues.
Trump first rose to prominence as a political force in the U.S. pushing baseless conspiracy theories that President Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen, though he was born in Hawaii.
Trump has, throughout his time as a political figure, referred to Black neighborhoods as “violent hellholes” and African nations as “s–thole countries.” He has also posted videos depicting the Obamas as apes, and framed undocumented migrants as “criminals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
White, pressed on the Obama-ape post in his interview with Remnick over the weekend, doubled down on his defense of the president.
“I don’t know about the Obama thing, to speak on that,” he said. “I’ve never seen it. I didn’t know that. But I can tell you this: He’s not racist. He’s not fascist. He loves this country. And if you’re an American—race, religion, whatever it is—President Trump is on your team. That I can guarantee you.”
White’s interview with The New Yorker comes ahead of the White House hosting a UFC event later in June to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The actual date falls exactly three weeks before the Fourth of July to coincide, incidentally, with the president’s 80th birthday.
