Donald Trump Marks Juneteenth By Complaining About Federal Holidays

President Donald Trump hasn’t formally acknowledged Juneteenth, but he did spend time Thursday complaining on social media that Americans have “too many non-working holidays.”

“It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed,” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform on Thursday evening. “The workers don’t want it either! Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every once [sic] working day of the year. It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Earlier Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt made it clear Trump has no plans to celebrate the federal holiday.

“I’m not tracking his signature on a proclamation today,” Leavitt said during a press briefing. “I know this is a federal holiday. I want to thank all of you for showing up to work. We are certainly here. We are working 24/7 right now.”

Juneteenth was officially designated a federal holiday in 2021 after a bill to codify the holiday passed both chambers of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support.

In 2020, Trump took credit for Juneteenth gaining national recognition and even campaigned on making it a federal holiday.

“I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous,” he said after he faced sharp criticism for scheduling a campaign rally on June 19, 2020. “It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.”

Black Americans have long celebrated Juneteenth, which commemorates the day in 1865 when a Union general rode into Galveston, Texas and told enslaved people there that the war was over and they were free — months after the conflict had ended and more than two years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Trump’s silence about Juneteenth marks a break from tradition established during his first administration. He commemorated the holiday with a presidential message each year of that term.

“As a Nation, we vow to never forget the millions of African Americans who suffered the evils of slavery,” he wrote in 2018.

But in his second term as president, Trump has actively worked to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the federal government, while simultaneously sanitizing the history of systemic racism against Black Americans.

As a result of Trump’s war on DEI initiatives, many Juneteenth celebrations across the country have been scaled back or canceled altogether as funding has decreased. About 15% of companies surveyed in a recent study said they would no longer celebrate events like Juneteenth.

While Trump’s message on Thursday seemed to indicate that he has set his sights on ending Juneteenth’s federal holiday status, he’ll first need Congress’ support to do so.