Jeffrey Lord, a political commentator for CNN who’s in love with President Donald Trump, has drawn controversy and backlash for what seems like the millionth time as he called Trump “the Martin Luther King of health care.”
This has been a heck of a week for historical comparisons: Sean Spicer’s comments that Assad, the Syrian President, is worse than Hitler because he thought Hitler, famous for his gas chambers, didn’t use chemical weapons, and he thought Hitler, famous for exterminating Jews and other minority groups from his country, didn’t use weapons against “his own people,” seemed impossible to top, but Lord’s comparison between Donald Trump and Martin Luther King really takes the cake.
Lord’s biggest goal is to trend on Twitter
There’s a theory that Lord makes these big, brash statements about Trump because when he says these things, he trends on Twitter and he’s in the spotlight for a couple of hours. He ticks off some influential figureheads around the political landscape and they get his ridiculous comments out to their followers who are equally outraged and also tweet about it, and Lord becomes a celebrity. Deadline put it best: “Mission accomplished.”
Lord made his attention-seeking comment on CNN’s “New Day” show. The topic of the day was Trump’s plans to slash subsidies to financially struggling people under the Affordable Care Act. He’s sneakily threatening to do this so he can box the Democrats in Congress into a corner to get them to agree to repeal and eventually replace Obamacare, since Trumpcare failed spectacularly and he’s still feeling bitter about it.
Also appearing on “New Day” were the show’s anchor Alisyn Camerota and Democratic political activist Symone Sanders. Lord set up his remarks by telling Camerota that he had something he wanted to say that he knew would “probably drive Symone crazy,” at which point he called Trump “the Martin Luther King of health care.”
Using JFK, Lord clarified his statements
Lord explained why he thinks of Trump that way by going back to his childhood, when John F.
Kennedy was President of the United States and led America into the Civil Rights Movement, which was the best thing for black people in America since the abolition of slavery. Black Lives Matter will eventually be considered the best thing for black people in America since the Civil Rights Movement.
But anyway, Lord told the story of JFK not wanting to “introduce the civil rights bill,” citing its lack of popularity and also lack of votes as reasons. He explained that Dr. King got the bill introduced by “putting people in the streets, in harm’s way,” to turn up the heat and get people’s attention, and it worked.
