Yusef Salaam speaks on June 1, 2023, in New York City. | Source: Dave Kotinsky / Getty
Exonerated Five member Yusef Salaam has won his Democratic primary in an election for a seat on the city council in NYC. And what better way to honor his victory than taking a shot at the man who once paid for multiple full-page ads calling for his death and is now currently drowning in legal woes of his own?
“There were large ads bought in 1989. A whisper for the state to kill us. A whisper, in fact, into the darkest enclaves of society for them to do to us what they had done to Emmitt Till,” Salaam said at a victory party on Tuesday in reference to former president and current defendant Donald Trump, according to the Daily Mail.
In 1989, Trump paid roughly $85,000 for full-page ads in several New York magazines calling on the state to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY” and “BRING BACK OUR POLICE” so that all five Black and brown teens who were falsely caused of raping a white woman in Central Park could be executed.
“I want to hate these murderers and I always will,” Trump wrote at the time. “I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”
Then, in 2019, 17 years after their convictions were vacated, Trump still refused to apologize for his lynch-happy ad campaign and acknowledge that the five men were wrongly convicted. So, it’s understandable that Salaam has been using some of his time on the political stage to mock the twice-impeached one-term president who is currently facing 37 criminal indictments for allegedly mishandling classified documents.
From the Daily Mail:
In his response to Trump’s arrest in April, Salaam said: ‘Now, after several decades and an unfortunate and disastrous presidency, we all know exactly who Donald J. Trump is – a man who seeks to deny justice and fairness for others, while claiming only innocence for himself.’
His campaign featured an ad that he took out using the same typeface and capital letters: ‘BRING BACK JUSTICE AND FAIRNESS! BUILD A BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR CENTRAL HARLEM!’
Salaam isn’t the only one celebrating his victory while chiding the former commander-in-voter-fraud-propaganda. The fine folks on Twitter were pretty relentless in doing the same.
At the end of the day, Salaam probably best described Trump’s situation in one word back in April:
“Karma.”
SEE ALSO:
Exonerated 5 Honored With Commemorative Central Park Entryway
Dear White People: Make Your White Friends Watch ‘When They See Us’
