President Donald Trump bemoaned the Juneteenth holiday on Thursday, saying Americans get too many days off and that it is hurting businesses.
"Too many non-working holidays in America,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Thursday night. “It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed.
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!"
There’s so much to break down from this ridiculous social media post it’s hard to know where to start.
First, it’s incredibly rich for Trump—who has spent many of the 151 days he’s been in office on the golf course rather than working—to say that American workers are given too much time off.
Trump is also notorious for not working hard himself, beginning his days late with scheduled "executive time"—where he sits like a vegetable in front of cable news raging about how it's not covering him favorably enough.
What's more, companies aren't forced to close on federal holidays, as there is no law requiring that workers be given days off. That’s in stark contrast to other countries, where the government mandates that workers get vacation days. For example, in the United Kingdom workers must be given 28 days of paid vacation annually. And in France and Spain, workers receive five weeks of mandated paid leave.
We’re sure that plenty of workers were toiling away on Thursday—I’m sure some readers here will let us know in the comments that their offices and workplaces were up and running.
Also, find us a worker who thinks, as Trump asserted, that they get too much vacation. We'll wait.
What’s even more hypocritical is that Trump honored Juneteenth every year during his first term as president, even before it was a federal holiday. According to the Associated Press, he claimed once to have made the holiday “very famous.”
Ultimately, Trump was likely mad about Thursday’s federal holiday not because workers got the day off, but because of what the holiday represents—the day commemorating the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans. Juneteenth was, for many years, mostly celebrated by the Black community before former President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that made the day an official federal holiday.
For Trump and his administration, they’d rather celebrate the traitorous Confederates, whose names they are now putting back on military bases across the country, than give workers the day off to celebrate the end of slavery. Gross.
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