Back in August of 1992, four years before his untimely death, rapper Tupac Shakur sat down in the studio for a wide-ranging interview with MTV News. Today, one seemingly off-hand comment he made has taken on new resonance.
“If you want to be successful, if you want to be like Trump,” he says, referencing the current Republican presidential frontrunner, “gimme, gimme, gimme. Push, push, push, push. Step, step, step. Crush, crush, crush. That’s how it all is, it’s like nobody ever stops.”
Speaking to his African-American fans, Shakur said they need to do more than just say “slavery was bad” and “bad whitey.”
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“Everybody’s smart enough to know that we’ve been slighted, and we want ours,” he continued. “And I don’t mean forty acres and a mule, because we’re past that. But we need help.”
Shakur went on to say that nobody should be raking in millions of dollars while others are “starving in the streets.” In addition to Trump, he called out Michael Jackson for not doing enough to help those who were struggling. “There’s no way that these people should own planes and these people don’t have houses, apartments, shacks, drawers, pants.”
“Even if you earned it, you still owe,” he said. And even though he was not as mega-rich as someone like Trump, Shakur said he felt “guilty” walking past someone who has less. “If I have $3,000 in my pocket, I feel like it’s wrong to give that person a quarter or a dollar.”
“Can you imagine someone has $32 million and this person has nothing?” he asked, growing more animated. “And you can sleep?”
Twenty-four years later, Donald Trump says he is worth $10 billion and has reportedly given no personal money to charity over the past five years.
If he were alive today, it sure sounds like Tupac would be feeling the Bern.
