JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI — While touring the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum this morning, President Donald Trump halted the tour long enough to demand the tour guide, an African American, show their long form birth certificate to him.
“The president is committed to his extreme vetting and America First immigration policies,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “And so he just simply wanted to make sure that the tour guide was born here, unlike, perhaps, maybe, we don’t know, the last president.”
There had already been some controversy surrounding the ribbon cutting ceremony at the museum. Civil Rights movement icon Congressman John Lewis boycotted the opening, citing Trump’s often divisive white nationalist rhetoric. Lewis was close friends with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and his absence was notable.
President Trump, asked by reporters later why he asked for the tour guide’s birth certificate, attempted an explanation.
“I just assume that every Urban I see is like Obama and born in Kenya or another foreign country like Hawaii,” Trump said.
President Trump revealed that he often asks African Americans that he meets or works with for proof of their American citizenship.
“Does it really make me racist to assume every Urban I see wasn’t born here,” Trump asked rhetorically. “I still asked Ben Carson for his before I gave him the HUD Secretary position.”
Former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who Trump pardoned earlier this year, said he was “very pleased” to hear that Trump asked for the guide’s birth certificate.
“You just never can be too sure,” Arpaio said. “So when you see a brown skinned person, isn’t it better to be on the safe, xenophobic, racist side, than sorry?”
