CNN's Audie Cornish laughed out loud at a conservative panelist's facile defense of president Donald Trump skipping the Juneteenth celebration.
The president did not formally mark Juneteenth on Thursday and instead complained there were "too many non-working holidays," and "CNN This Morning" played a montage of social media users lambasting his approach to the 160th anniversary of Union troops arriving in Texas to enforce the end of slavery.
"Twitter is not having it," said New York Times columnist Lourdes Garcia-Navarro.
"As it said, heavy Negro spiritual sigh," Cornish added. "What do we make of America's short-lived awokening and reckoning?"
Bluey inaccurately claimed that Trump had signed the congressionally approved Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law in 2020, when in fact Joe Biden did so a year later, although he claims he had made the long-marked day "very famous."
"Well, president Trump signed this into law in 2020, let's remember that," said Bluey, executive editor of The Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal website.
"Oh, does he remember that?" Cornish interjected. "This is what we're talking about."
Bluey responded by offering a simplistic history of the celebration.
"I don't know," he said, "and it's definitely an occasion worth celebrating. The Heritage Foundation's president Kevin Roberts articulated this. I mean, it's a great moment in American history when word reached, you know, those in Galveston, Texas, that the president, [Abraham] Lincoln, had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. I think we should celebrate our history."
"No one believes," Cornish said, laughing. "Trump is not saying that, Rob."
"Yeah, I, well," Bluey stammered. "I can't answer for him."
Cornish laughed even louder at his flailing follow-up, and Garcia-Navarro, who had been smirking through Bluey's history lesson, said Trump skipping the celebration was part of a broader and troubling pattern in his presidency.
"Actually, the real question is why not?" she said. "Why not, and why are you equating Black history, American history with DEI? Why are those two things being conflated, and that is a very important question because everything is getting sucked into this moniker that the Trump administration wants to kind of, you know, push on us, and this is, as you rightly mentioned, important American history."
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