The scene was almost too perfect, a grotesque parody of American arrogance played out over lunch with African leaders.
There, in the midst of diplomatic niceties, stood the so-called leader of the free world, President Donald J. Trump, marveling like a colonial-era tourist at the exotic spectacle of an African man speaking English.
“Thank you, and such good English,” Trump said to Liberian President Joseph Boakai, as if the man had just performed a circus trick. “Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?”
One could almost hear the ghosts of Monrovia’s founders—freed slaves who built a nation from the ashes of American hypocrisy—howling in disbelief.
Liberia, a country whose very existence is a rebuke to American racism, whose official language is English, whose capital is named after the slaveholder-president James Monroe, was now being treated as some linguistic curiosity by a man who once asked why the U.S. couldn’t have more immigrants from Norway.
This is not just a gaffe. This is the distilled essence of a worldview so blinkered, so steeped in the myth of white superiority, that it cannot fathom an African head of state speaking the language of his own country without some white savior’s intervention.
It would be like praising a French president for his mastery of French, or complimenting a New Jersey diner owner on his ability to flip a burger—except in this case, the ignorance is laced with centuries of racial condescension.
Once again, we have absolute proof that Donald Trump is as dumb as a stump.
Liberia was founded by Black Americans fleeing the very bigotry that Trump’s remark echoed.
They carried with them the Constitution, the English language, and the cruel irony of becoming colonizers themselves.
The Americo-Liberians, as they were called, ruled over the indigenous population with the same exclusionary fervor they had escaped, creating a fractured nation that would endure coups, civil wars, and Firestone’s rubber empire extracting wealth while leaving the people in poverty.
And now, in 2025, the president of the United States stands before one of Liberia’s leaders, marveling at his English like a 19th-century missionary encountering a “civilized native.” The irony is so thick you could choke on it.
This is not just about Trump.
This is about the American disease—the willful ignorance of history, the reflexive assumption that anything outside the white Western experience is inherently lesser.
It’s the same ignorance that lets politicians in Trenton dismiss Paterson’s immigrant communities as “foreign,” or allows Shore towns to pretend redlining was just a Southern problem.
But here’s the thing: Liberia knows its history, even if Trump doesn’t.
Monrovia’s streets are named after American abolitionists. Its flag is a replica of the Stars and Stripes, but with a single star—a defiant symbol of Black self-determination.
The English language, imposed and then reclaimed, is not a novelty there. It’s a fact of life.
So when the president of the United States asks, with all the subtlety of a plantation overseer, where an African leader “learned” to speak his own country’s language, the answer isn’t just “Liberia.”
The answer is: Because you made us.
And that, dear readers, is the joke—tragic, unfunny, and as American as apple pie.