Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” in reacting to Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, Al Sharpton said, “We are not going down without a fight and Donald needs to know that.”
Sharpton said, “I think that we are in a real moment like Nixon. I mean, if you look at the backlash after the Great Society and of a lot of the unrest, that is what defeated Hubert Humphrey and brought in Richard Nixon. I was a kid. I remember it like it was yesterday. You had assassinations of Kennedy, King. Unrest. People go for extreme measures to respond. Trump played to that. I said that. He did all of the dog whistles. This is not Bernie Sanders populism. This is George Wallace populism that he’s doing. And I think that many people have got to call it the way it is. Now the question is how will he govern? But he cannot say he did not run a campaign that has created a lot of racial fears and a lot of divisiveness and he played to the crowd and he knew what he was playing to. I know him here in New York. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was playing to the worst elements. The question is now what are you going to do?”
He added, “And I think that there’s going to be — rather than going to a blame game, we need to analyze, this man’s going to be president and all that many of us have fought for during our lives is at stake. And we are not going down without a fight and Donald needs to know that.”
(h/t RCP Video)
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN