During his address to God at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Rep. Jonathan Jackson, a democrat from Illinois, called on President Donald Trump to be “invested in the elevation of suffering” of people in this country, including “the families preparing to bury their loved ones in Minneapolis.”
Rep. Jackson, son of civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, asked God to “remind” the president “that he has the power to turn mourning into dancing or to reduce the country into a cosmic elegy of chaos and suffering” as Trump stood just feet away, his eyes fluttering open and shut during the prayer.
The representative’s prayer provided an uninterrupted moment in a crowded room to call attention to the ongoing and violent federal immigration operation in Minneapolis, which, as Jackson noted, included agents fatally shooting two US citizens: Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
Both men were on stage for the 74th National Prayer Breakfast, an event that every president has attended since Dwight D. Eisenhauer. It was Trump’s sixth time speaking at the breakfast, and his address lasted over an hour and 15 minutes.
In that address, Trump falsely claimed that he won the popular vote in the 2016 election, joked that “I really think I probably should make it” into heaven, and defended his Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who is facing increasing calls for her to be fired or impeached, among other boilerplate talking points for the president.
Rep. Jackson has been a critic of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s operations and was a part of the group of Illinois lawmakers who were denied entry into an ICE processing facility during the summer, before being granted access late last year. He’s faced pushback, though, for buying stock in Palantir, a major ICE contractor. The representative, according to NOTUS, “regretted buying this stock and that he asked his financial adviser to get rid of his Palantir holdings.”
Elsewhere in Rep. Jackson’s prayer about Trump, he asked God to “increase the stature of his wisdom,” to “lead this president into greater levels of compassion,” and to “give him greater clarity, greater courage, and greater capacity to do what is right.”
“For the sake of this nation, for the sake of this world, we pray that goodness and mercy would announce themselves in his life in new and powerful ways,” Rep. Jackson said, adding, “remind him that we are all Americans, all made in the image of God and that none of us are free unless all of us have our freedoms protected.”
