President Donald Trump has lashed out at Rev. Al Sharpton in a Truth Social rant calling for the Federal Communications Commission to “look into” cancelling NBC’s broadcast license.
In the post, the president recounted his long acquaintance with the veteran civil rights activist while sharing a picture of him in his younger days when he was much heavier.
“I knew Al Sharpton for many years, not that it matters, but he was a major ‘TRUMP’ fan,” the president wrote. “He’d ask me to go to his fake Rallies all the time, because I brought BIG Crowds, and he couldn’t get anybody to come without me.”
“Then he did the Tawana Brawley Hoax, one of the worst Low Level Scams in History, and that set him back, BIG TIME!,” Trump said, alluding to a notorious 1987 case in which a Black girl falsely accused four white men of kidnapping and raping her.
The president continued: “Then [Sharpton] got to know Brian Roberts, Chairman of Fake News NBC, who gave him what would become one of the Lowest Rated Shows in Television History. Roberts is afraid to take him off because it wouldn’t be ‘Politically Correct.’
“This is just one of the many reasons that the Federal Communications Commission should look into the license of NBC, which shows almost exclusively positive Democrat content. Likewise, ABC Fake News — About the same thing, 97 percent negative to Republicans!”
Roberts is in fact the CEO and Chairman of Comcast, not NBC. Sharpton’s show, PoliticsNation, airs on MSNBC, not NBC, which are two distinct networks, albeit under the umbrella of the same parent company, NBCUniversal, which is in turn owned by Comcast.
Trump accompanied his meandering post with a 1988 image of Sharpton, presumably intended to be unflattering, showing the reverend posing in a red shirt and suspenders.
A lifelong Democrat, Sharpton has angered Trump in the past by supporting Kamala Harris’s failed 2024 presidential campaign and by appearing with the former “Central Park Five” at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last August. The group were five Black men exonerated after being falsely accused of the rape of a white jogger in New York City in the 1989.
Their story remains an embarassment to Trump given that he took out a series of newspaper advertisements at the time calling for the quintet to face the death penalty, wrongly assuming their guilt.
The president has recently ramped up his attacks on his media critics, celebrating over the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late-night show earlier this year and, more recently, over the short-lived suspension of Jimmy Kimmel.
FCC chairman Brendan Carr, for his part, was attacked on both sides of the aisle for making a Mafia-style threat against Kimmel and was parodied on the returning Saturday Night Live over the weekend.
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