Friday on CNN’s “Situation Room,” while discussing White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ statement on Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) not joining President Donald Trump at the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said Trump has “never missed an opportunity to fan the flames of racial hatred.”
Jeffries said, “This is not even a close call. On the one hand you have Congressman Bennie Thompson, a well-respected member of the Congressional Black Caucus, who did a lot in his younger days in terms of the Mississippi civil rights movement, and of course, Congressman John Lewis, civil rights icon, a man who almost lost his life on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during Bloody Sunday fighting to make sure every single American could have the right to vote, and on the other hand you have the birther-in-chief, someone who never missed an opportunity to fan the flames of racial hatred whenever he thinks it’s to his personal, political or professional advantage.”
He added, “When you look at Donald Trump’s history, whether in 1970 when the Trump organization was sued by the Nixon Justice Department for racial discrimination in the housing market in refusing to rent to blacks and Puerto Ricans, whether it was in 1980s when Donald Trump led the lynch mob into the Central Park Five, African-American and Latino young men who were wrongfully convicted, wrongfully accused and wrongfully imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit, and then, of course, his five-year crusade perpetrating the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. And, Wolf, that’s before Charlottesville and all the other shenanigans that we have seen as president. What in Donald Trump’s history suggests that him showing up to the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum is anything than a political stunt and photo op?”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.