Waka Flocka Flame has made a request of his presidential candidate of choice, Donald Trump, and it has gotten pushback from a number of fans who found it confusing and bizarre.
The Atlanta rapper posted to X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday (January 20) with a request for Trump: that he get rid of Columbus Day.
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“Dear Trump abolish Christopher Columbus Day,” Waka wrote. “As a what’s called Blackman in United States this holiday is a spit in our faces… Thanks from Waka Flocka Flame and the People!!!”
You can see the message below.
Dear Trump abolish Christopher Columbus Day… As a what’s called Blackman in United States this holiday is a spit in our faces… Thanks from Waka Flocka Flame and the People!!!
— Waka Flocka Flame 🔥 (@WakaFlocka) January 21, 2024
The request struck observers as unusual for a number of reasons. First, Trump is no longer in office.
“Bruh he not even the damn president!” one person replied, while another said: “Last thing that private citizen, who can’t abolish holidays, is thinking about is Columbus Day. He’s trying to stay out of jail. Focus, dude.”
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Second, while the president can declare a day a public holiday by proclamation, an official national holiday can only be created by the legislature.
“Dude, the president can’t declare or ‘abolish’ a federal holiday. Declaration of federal holidays are done by an act of Congress,” one informed user pointed out. “You honestly could’ve Googled this.”
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Third, Trump has been particularly vociferous in his defense of Columbus Day. In 2020 he made headlines for his “Proclamation on Columbus Day,” which took shots at “radical activists [who] have sought to undermine Christopher Columbus’s legacy.”
“Rather than learn from our history, this radical ideology and its adherents seek to revise it, deprive it of any splendor, and mark it as inherently sinister,” he wrote. “They seek to squash any dissent from their orthodoxy.
“We must not give in to these tactics or consent to such a bleak view of our history. We must teach future generations about our storied heritage, starting with the protection of monuments to our intrepid heroes like Columbus.”
There has been a decades-long effort, going back to the 1970s, to replace the federal celebration of Columbus with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In 2021, Joe Biden issued a presidential proclamation about Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which is celebrated on the same day as Columbus Day.
He has continued to do so every year since. However, Columbus Day remains a federal holiday.
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All of this led to a barrage of criticism, with people referring to Waka Flocka Flame as a “dummy” and wondering if he’d been hacked.
The Flockaveli rapper initially endorsed Donald Trump last October, tweeting “TRUMP2024.”
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He later shared a photo of him standing next to the controversial businessman-turned-politician in front of a presidential seal, and made it his new profile picture.
This came after Flocka publicly criticized Trump in both 2015 and 2017.
