Mike Pence really went over the line this time. He would have done much better to have spoken in general terms about the holiday honoring slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and not made any ludicrous efforts to equate Dr. King’s greatness with Donald Trump’s ineptitude — but no. Pence actually tried to gaslight everybody into thinking that there was a similarity. Beyond the fact that King and Trump put their pants on one leg at a time, there is none. King’s son, Martin Luther King III wasted no time straightening Pence out.
.@OfficialMLK3 in DC blasts Pence for invoking his father:
"The vice president attempted to compare the president to Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr was a bridge builder, not a wall builder. Martin Luther King Jr. would say, ‘Love, not hate,will make America great.'"— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) January 21, 2019
If you missed it, Pence said on Sunday,
“But one of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was, ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.’You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process to become a more perfect union.”
“That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on the Congress to do. Come to the table in a spirit of good faith. We’ll secure our border, we’ll reopen the government, and we’ll move our nation forward as the president said yesterday to even a broader discussion about immigration reform in the months ahead.”
Pence and Trump literally spent two minutes at the MLK memorial, laying a wreath. But that’s not the problem. The problem is Pence needs to STFU and let others observe the solemnity of the occasion, rather than walking through it with phony platitudes and false equivalencies. If anybody should get a prize for putting the proverbial turd in the punchbowl, it would be Mike Pence.
