Rev. Jesse Jackson spent his life fighting for the little guy, and it took about thirty seconds after his death for the Democratic Party to hijack his memorial service and turn it into an anti-Trump pep rally. Obama, Biden, and Clinton showed up to the House of Hope church in Chicago on Friday — not to honor the man, but to audition for a resistance that nobody asked for.
You’d think three former presidents could manage to say something nice about a dead civil rights leader for five hours without making it about themselves. You’d be wrong.
Jackson’s son, Jesse Jackson Jr., had actually held a press conference before the funeral specifically asking that politics be kept out of the service. He wanted the focus to be on his father’s legacy. That’s a reasonable request when your dad just died. But Democrats gonna Democrat.
Obama took the podium and delivered a nearly 30-minute eulogy that was really a 30-minute campaign speech with a dead man as the backdrop. “Each day we wake up to some new assault on our democratic institutions,” Obama told the crowd. Subtle! When someone in the audience shouted that Obama should run for a third term, he replied, “Nah, see I believe in the Constitution.” The crowd went nuts. Apparently the Constitution was a real laugh line at a funeral. Who knew?
Then Biden shuffled up and delivered what might be the most Biden moment in the history of Biden moments. Standing in front of a mostly-Black audience at a memorial service for a civil rights icon, the former president announced: “I’m a hell of a lot smarter than most of you.”
(Read that again. He really said that. At Jesse Jackson’s funeral. To a room full of Black mourners.)
Biden claimed he was talking about his childhood stutter and how people used to assume he was stupid. Which, fine — but maybe read the room? Just once? The guy has been saying the wrong thing at the wrong time for fifty years and he’s not going to stop now just because somebody’s dead.
Kamala Harris couldn’t resist either. “I predicted a lot of what’s happening right now,” she told the crowd. “I’m not into saying ‘I told you so,’ but we did see it coming.” Imagine walking into someone’s funeral and opening with “I told you so.” These people are unbelievable.
Al Sharpton — because of course Al Sharpton — blamed Black voters for the 2024 loss, coining the phrase “Negro amnesia” to describe anyone who didn’t vote for Kamala. Stay classy, Rev.
The next day, Jackson Jr. had finally had enough. “Yesterday I listened for several hours of three United States presidents who do not know Jesse Jackson,” he said publicly. He pointed out that his father’s life wasn’t defined by the “political order” but by his commitment to the marginalized. Translation: my dad spent his life fighting for people, and you three spent five hours fighting over a microphone.
Here’s the thing Democrats never learn. They’ve been pulling this stunt for decades, and it backfires every single time.
Remember Paul Wellstone? The Minnesota senator died in a plane crash right before the 2002 midterms. His memorial service turned into such an aggressive political rally that Governor Jesse Ventura walked out in disgust and called it “deceitful.” Wellstone’s replacement on the ballot, Walter Mondale, had an eight-point lead going into that memorial. By Election Day? He lost to Norm Coleman by 2.2 points. That’s a ten-point swing — from a funeral. Democrats lost their one-seat Senate majority because they couldn’t stop campaigning for five minutes.
They did the same thing at John Lewis’s funeral in 2020, where Obama compared Trump to George Wallace from the pulpit. They did it at Aretha Franklin’s eight-hour funeral in 2018 — which ended up being a voter registration drive with a casket in the room. And now they’ve done it to Jesse Jackson.
The pattern is always the same: somebody dies, Democrats see a camera, and they can’t help themselves.
Mark my words — this Wellstone effect is going to haunt them again. Democrats are heading into the 2026 midterms with a slim generic ballot lead and a party that still hasn’t figured out why they lost in 2024. Every time they turn a funeral into a rally, they remind swing voters exactly why they can’t be trusted with anything sacred. Sharpton’s blaming Black voters for “amnesia” while Obama gives 30-minute stump speeches over a casket. You think the Black men who shifted toward Trump in 2024 are watching this and thinking, “Yeah, those are my guys”?
The Wellstone memorial cost Democrats the Senate. The Jackson funeral won’t have a single election on the ballot next week to measure the damage — but the footage will be in every Republican ad from now until November. Obama ranting about “assaults on democratic institutions” while Jesse Jackson’s body is barely cold. Biden telling a room full of mourners he’s smarter than them. Harris doing her “I told you so” routine at a funeral.
If you’re a Republican ad maker, you don’t even need to edit any of this. Just run the clips.
Jesse Jackson Jr. said it best: they do not know Jesse Jackson. And after that performance, we’d add one more thing — they don’t know when to shut up.