

Back to work!
Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images
Having written a column earlier this week about the ambivalent status of the federal Juneteenth holiday in the wake of the second Trump administration’s assault on race-conscious anti-discrimination practices, I must have refreshed the White House website 100 times to see if the president had made any official utterance about this commemoration of the end of slavery. He did, after all, regularly issue proclamations recognizing Juneteenth throughout his first term, and during his 2020 reelection campaign he endorsed making it a federal holiday. But in 2025? Nothing at all. Yet late on June 19 he offered this indirect but rather pointed comment on Truth Social:
Too many non-working holidays in America. 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 working day of the year. It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
It’s a bit weird to acknowledge a day commemorating the elimination of involuntary servitude with a demand that people work more for the same pay. But Trump has already made it known that he thinks Americans get too many days off work, even though the United States rather famously guarantees far fewer holiday or vacation days than most countries. Assuming, that he was complaining about Juneteenth (since, you know, he said it on Juneteenth), it’s worth noting that an awful lot of businesses, probably a majority, were open on June 19, in part because of the less than enthusiastic attitude of leaders like Donald Trump.
Juneteenth has been a federal government holiday since Joe Biden signed legislation making it so in 2021. If Trump wanted to reverse that decision, he could have certainly asked the Republican-controlled Congress to get it done along with the other vast changes in law and policy they are busily engaged in executing on his orders. Indeed, if he really believes holidays like Juneteenth have a huge negative effect on the U.S. economy, he could even have made the revocation of the holiday another nasty little provision of his One Big Beautiful Bill.
Instead of a forthright attack, the president just disrespected Juneteenth in a snarky little Truth Social post. Maybe those who say TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) have a point.
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