Donald Trump demonized Yusef Salaam as a child. So why has Salaam forgiven him?

Now that Donald Trump has won the Iowa caucuses, I’ve been hearing the former president’s name even more than usual. I’m not happy about it.

That is, except for during a segment from ABC’s The View on Monday, featuring Yusef Salaam, who was recently elected to the New York City Council. That name should be familiar to some, and not because of his new job.

Salaam was one of the “Central Park Five,” the teenagers who were wrongfully imprisoned for the rape and assault of a jogger in 1989.

On the morning talk show, he discussed his unlikely journey from being unfairly incarcerated as a teen to becoming an elected official. What captured my attention wasn’t so much his incredible story, which I had heard before, but how he talked about all that had happened. He did so with the grace of the late South African President Nelson Mandela.

He told the show’s cohosts: “You have to forgive those who harmed you. Because if you live through life without forgiveness, you carry all of the weight of the ball and chain into every single room with you.”

I can’t recall the last time I’d heard someone in his position speak so eloquently about the importance of forgiveness. Especially against the recent backdrop of Trump’s big talk of retribution and getting back at his political enemies, it was incredibly refreshing.

Trump’s name came up during the interview, as well, because of the key role he played in the perversion of justice Salaam experienced.

The rape of the jogger in Central Park was a horrific crime that rocked the city and the nation. At the time, I was living in Washington, D.C. Those were pre-internet days, but I remember following the nightmarish case from afar as best I could. Trump, then a real estate developer based in New York City, took out full-page ads in several city newspapers that called for the reinstatement of the death penalty after the crime took place, which was clearly directed at Salaam and the four other children — yes, children ― who were accused of it.

Although Trump didn’t name the accused, the ad described them as animals. It mentioned how families could no longer go for leisurely strolls in the park or sit outside of their homes, and had become “hostages to a world ruled by the law of the streets, as roving bands of wild criminals roam our neighborhoods, dispensing their own vicious brand of twisted hatred on whomever they encounter.”

His pointed words, which appeared shortly after the attack, added to the furor. They were the equivalent of pouring kerosene on a burning fire.

Partly because of that ad, a lot of people — Black and white — already had their minds made up about the case before the teens ever went to trial. Lots of people — myself included — blindly accepted the narrative that those teens were guilty. All five of them wound up being convicted and imprisoned. Salaam served nearly seven years.

Then, in 2002, Matias Reyes, a convicted murderer and serial rapist, confessed to having been the actual assailant. DNA evidence backed up his claims, and the convictions of Salaam and his four friends were overturned. Numerous news stories, documentaries, and Ava DuVernay’s Netflix series, When They See Us, followed.

Trump has never publicly apologized for the ad, despite being given opportunities to do so.

On Monday, the day the nation celebrated the birth of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Salaam called Trump’s advertisement from back then “a whisper into the most sadistic, darkest enclaves of society to do to us what they had done to Emmett Till.”

And yet, when Trump himself was arraigned and arrested last year in New York following charges of falsifying business records, Salaam wrote in a fundraising message, made to look like that old newspaper ad, that he wished the former president “no harm.”

“Rather, I am putting my faith in the judicial system to seek out the truth,” Salaam wrote. “I hope that you exercise your civil liberties to the fullest, and that you get what the Exonerated Five did not get — a presumption of innocence, and a fair trial.”

The grace Salaam displayed in that moment — and during his Monday interview — was astonishing.

He has forgiven Trump, saying: “Forgiveness is for myself.”

What a man. What a contrast to the former president, who pledged to his followers that he would seek retribution.

We all should strive to be as compassionate as Salaam.

Bad things happen. But instead of letting it break him, Salaam used the experience as fuel. “I’m going to take this lemon that life gave me and make lemonade,” he said Monday. “And I’m going to look cool doing it.”

Trump could learn an awful lot from him.

But we all know the odds that that will happen.