Rev. Al Sharpton used a Thursday appearance on MS NOW's Morning Joe to accuse President Donald Trump and Republicans of trying to drag the country back toward a more racist era. He linked that warning to Trump's planned UFC event on the White House lawn and to the politics behind the redistricting fight.
Sharpton said the pattern mattered because it was not just about a sports spectacle or a maps fight in the states. It was, in his telling, part of a larger effort to bring Americans back to a country they had already struggled to leave behind. “Trump and others are trying to bring us back to an America that we struggled to get out of,” he said.
He argued that there was a direct connection between the proposed fights on the White House lawn and the political arguments over redistricting. In his view, UFC and similar events were tied to an older order, one in which people were entertained watching others fight for slave masters. That image, Sharpton said, fit the symbolism of a White House event that he cast as more than just a show.
The criticism widened when Mika Brzezinski linked his comments to immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, and Sharpton moved to a familiar figure in Trump's political imagination: Andrew Jackson. He said that when Trump was first elected in 2016 and entered the Oval Office in 2017, one of the first things he did was hang a picture of Jackson, whom Sharpton described as a slave-owning president.
Sharpton said Jackson nominated Judge Roger Taney to the Supreme Court and noted that Taney later became chief justice and presided over the Dred Scott decision. He then asked why no one had pressed Trump about Jackson at the time. “Why Jackson?” he said, adding that he did not even remember learning much about Jackson in elementary school.
That is where Sharpton drew the line from history to the present. Trump admired Jackson, Sharpton said, and Jackson was the kind of country Trump wanted people to go back to. The country should resist that, he said, “with all we have.” Whether the White House UFC event actually happens is still unanswered, but Sharpton made clear that he sees the planned spectacle as part of a bigger fight over who gets to define American power and memory.
