Top Democrats Use MLK Legacy To Attack Trump and Label Him a Racist
On Monday, the nation honored the life and death and historic achievements of civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. King led the peaceful fight for equal rights during the civil rights era prior to his untimely assassination and was perhaps best known for urging all Americans to judge others on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin.
Unfortunately, far too many people on the left — both elected officials and media figures — who purported to honor King on the special day set aside for him, instead used that special day as a launching pad to actually dishonor King. They cast judgment upon President Donald Trump and the mischaracterized portrayal of him by the media, instead of by the actions he has taken since assuming office.
The Huffington Post reported that many in the media criticized the Trump White House for not making any grand plans to celebrate MLK Day, and dismissed his brief visit to King’s memorial to show his respect on Monday as inadequate. Indeed, prolific race-baiter and MSNBC host Al Sharpton characterized the short visit as little more than a “drive-by” on King’s legacy, and called Trump the “most insensitive president we’ve seen in our lifetime.”
A number of elected Democrats used MLK day to disparage the president as a racist, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer saying that Trump’s 2016 election represented a “giant step back” in terms of King’s legacy.
However, Schumer’s remark was nothing compared to that offered up by New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who left no doubt whatsoever that he viewed Trump as a racist white supremacist Ku Klux Klan leader attempting to re-implement the horrible (Democrat-imposed) Jim Crow laws of old.
In a speech at Sharpton’s National Action Network, Jeffries said, “These are challenging times in the United States of America. We have a hater in the White House: the birther in chief, the grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“One of the things that we’ve learned is that while Jim Crow might be dead, he’s still got some nieces and nephews who are alive and well,” he added.
Jeffries was certainly not alone in dishonoring King’s legacy by focusing in on racism, though, as Fox News reported that independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — who is most likely running for president in 2020 — delivered a speech in South Carolina in which he openly accused Trump of being racist.
Sanders said, “I must tell you, today we talk about justice and today we talk about racism, and I must tell you: It gives me no pleasure to tell you that we now have a president of the United States who is a racist.”
“We have a president of the United States who has done something that no other president in modern history has done,” he continued. “What a president is supposed to do is to bring us together.”
“And we have a president intentionally, purposely — he is trying to divide us up by the color of our skin, by our gender, by the country we came from, by our religion,” Sanders added, apparently oblivious to the fact that conservatives had said the exact same thing — with evidence to support it — about former President Barack Obama.
Rounding out this collection of Democrats using King’s memory to attack Trump was New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand — who is also running for president in 2020 — who seemed to squirm and shift focus toward Trump when she received some surprisingly tough questions during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Tapper noted that Gillibrand had described Trump’s immigration policies as “racist,” but pointed out she’d held similar stances earlier in her career, and asked why he was racist but she was not, to which Gillibrand replied that her prior positions were “certainly not empathetic, and not kind.”
Tapper pressed her on the difference between “not empathetic” and “racist,” and that is when Gillibrand went off. “So what President Trump is doing is creating fear and division and darkness across this country that I’ve never seen before,” and later added, “President Trump is destroying the moral fabric of what this country stands for,” and a short moment after that, said, “This president has sown fear and division that just makes us weaker.”
“I think what he has done is so horrible and so mean-spirited, that I am nothing like him and never will be, as my values haven’t changed,” said Gillibrand, apparently forgetting how she had just described earlier how her “values” had indeed changed once she’d moved from rural upstate New York to Brooklyn in 2008.
Rev. King’s overarching message was one of love and acceptance regardless of race, and while that did include calling out explicit racism when seen, it also included the idea that we as a society should move past a focus on racial issues and come together as one.
Today’s Democrats, and their media allies, did that message a great disservice by focusing incessantly on allegations of racism and hatred and intolerance, not by pointing to any specific actions or statements by Trump, but merely in general, as based off of the media-perpetuated lies that Trump is an unrepentant racist — among many other things — who hates minorities and wants to re-institute racist laws imposed by past Democrats.
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