As news spread of Jesse Jackson’s death at the age of 84, reactions to his passing were predictably mixed.

President Donald Trump, surprisingly to some, posted numerous pictures of himself with Jackson and offered glowing words on Truth Social: “The Reverend Jesse Jackson is Dead at 84. I knew him well, long before becoming President. He was a good man, with lots of personality, grit, and ‘street smarts.’ He was very gregarious — Someone who truly loved people!”

Trump added:

Despite the fact that I am falsely and consistently called a Racist by the Scoundrels and Lunatics on the Radical Left, Democrats ALL, it was always my pleasure to help Jesse along the way. I provided office space for him and his Rainbow Coalition, for years, in the Trump Building at 40 Wall Street; Responded to his request for help in getting CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM passed and signed, when no other President would even try; Single handedly pushed and passed long term funding for Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs), which Jesse loved, but also, which other Presidents would not do; Responded to Jesse’s support for Opportunity Zones, the single most successful economic development package yet approved for Black business men/women, and much more. Jesse was a force of nature like few others before him.

And in typical Trump fashion, he also took the opportunity to throw shade at Barack Obama, claiming that Jackson disliked him because Obama failed to give Jackson credit for helping him win the presidency.

There may be truth to that, given that Jackson ran unsuccessful bids for the Democrat presidential primary nomination twice during the 1980s. What Jackson did accomplish, however, was to establish himself as a significant voice representing black Americans.

As a young man, Jackson was a disciple of Martin Luther King Jr., working with him in the Civil Rights Movement and supporting King’s nonviolent protest methods. He helped rally support for King and joined him on the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965.

Jackson advanced in leadership roles within King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), taking on the organization’s economic development and empowerment program, Operation Breadbasket. King praised Jackson, saying, “We knew he was going to do a good job, but he’s done better than a good job.”

Jackson was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, the fateful day that King was assassinated.

He continued within the SCLC for three years before resigning to run his own black empowerment organization known as People United to Save Humanity, or PUSH. Jackson left the SCLC after being accused of using the organization for personal gain, which likely wasn’t far off the mark, as he would go on to promote himself as a de facto leader of black America.

He would soon turn to politics and create the organization for which he is best known, the National Rainbow Coalition. His aim was to counter Ronald Reagan’s social and economic policies. Gifted with a quick tongue and wittiness, Jackson often threw clever and pointed rhetorical jabs at his opponents, and he became a ubiquitous presence in the media.

But for all his history with civil rights, race hustling and peddling grievance culture was his primary game. He used mob-like threats to shake down corporation after corporation for “racial justice.” Jackson was one of the forebears of today’s woke culture. Worst of all, he helped keep blacks on the Democrats’ urban poverty plantation, repeatedly demonizing Republicans as being at best unintentionally racist, if not outright bigots, while he and the Democrats advocated nothing but leftist income redistribution schemes for blacks.

In short, he was a demagogue who pushed socialist and Marxist ideas with religious zeal. Yet at the same time, as maddening as he could be, he exuded a certain charm, especially in his rhetorical expressions. He was hard to ever take seriously, and as the years passed, he became more of a caricature of a bygone era.

The trouble for Jackson and his ilk is that with the passing of the Civil Rights Act, the battle for equality under the law had been won. Despite this reality, he and others (his pal Al Sharpton chief among them) continued to ply the game of grievance politics, seeing a seemingly never vanquished bogeyman everywhere he looked, even when it had to be made up out of whole cloth.

And in so doing, Jackson and the rest of his Democrat cohorts have utterly destroyed King’s legacy.