*After CNN’s resident GOP supporter Jeffrey Lord was firebroiled Thursday by Democratic activist Symone Sanders for suggesting that President Trump is “the Martin Luther King of healthcare,” the network brought Lord back on to explain himself.
“I wasn’t comparing President Trump and Dr. King,” said Lord on Anderson Cooper’s “AC360” Thursday evening, adding, “who, by the way, the latter, was a hero of mine when I was a kid.”
Lord had appeared on “New Day” earlier to discuss reports that Trump was threatening to cut Affordable Care Act subsidies to the poor in a strategic move aimed at getting Democrats to the table on Obamacare repeal and replace.
“What I was doing was comparing their strategy. Dr. King quite specifically – and I knew this when I was talking about this on air this morning – was talking about creating a crisis,” Lord said.
He then began to read from King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, “which I am well familiar with,” Lord said, reading a line from King’s 1963 defense of non-violent resistance to racism: “Non-violent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such attention, that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”
“Donald Trump isn’t taking to the streets; he has the power of the presidency,” Lord acknowledged. “But clearly, if he withholds payments from insurance companies, which Wall Street Journal said would result in a meltdown, that’s a crisis. So he is doing the same thing: creating a crisis to get to a negotiation. That’s the point. Period.”
Also on the panel was Democratic CNN contributor Bakari Sellers, who took this opportunity to call Lord’s remark an affront to King’s legacy and emblematic of the culture of ignorance and anti-intellectualism ushered in by Donald Trump.
“What we saw him do was pervert” King’s writing, Sellers said.
“Donald Trump is trying to bring Democrats to the table to gut a piece of legislation which has insured many and saved lives. If he is successful, people will die in rural hospitals like the one I used to represent will close,” warned Sellers, a former member of the South Carolina House.
Sellers noted his father marched with King and that “many people were beaten and many people were killed so that I could sit on this set today and the fact that someone can make this comparison…shows just how low our political discourse has sunken.”
Lord, in response, said his father lost his job and later a business “because he stood up for black Americans when we lived in the south in 1965.”
Reading between the lines, Sellers shot back, “I am not using a race card. I’m a black American citizen who stands on the shoulders of people like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
“In our political discourse we have to remove these Hitler and Nazi comparisons – and Donald Trump is not Martin Luther King Jr.,” Sellers said.
Watch the entire CNN segment below:
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