‘Embarrassingly incompetent’: NAACP official scolds Kellyanne Conway who can’t explain Trump’s diss of MLK Day

 January 20, 2020 By David Edwards


Sherrilyn Ifill, who serves as president of the NAACP Defense Fund, on Monday lashed out at presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway after she could not explain what President Donald Trump was doing to mark Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

“He’s preparing for Davos,” Conway said in a Monday morning interview, “and agrees with many of the things that Dr. Martin Luther King stood for and agreed with for many years, including unity.”

“What an embarrassingly incompetent answer,” Ifill later told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “There’s is no answer that she can give that would be acceptable because he’s doing nothing to commemorate MLK Day, and frankly, it would be hypocritical if he tried to do that.”


“Just in the last week, the tweets that he’s put up, knowing that [the pro-gun rally in Virginia] was coming today, knowing that the governor of Virginia had declared a state of emergency today because of credible threats of violence given what happened in 2017 in Charlottesville,” she continued. “We’ve now reset what the president is supposed to do. He’s not supposed to call for calm and peace.

“He just gets to tweet whatever he wants,” Ifill pointed out. “He’s not doing anything to commemorate MLK Day and that’s why it’s important that we do that work. We don’t need Mr. Trump to lead us in knowing what to do around equality and justice.”

Watch the video below from MSNBC.

Trump likens himself to Martin Luther King Jr while boasting about low black unemployment

Kellyanne Conway claims civil rights leader would not support impeachment

Alex Woodward New York Tuesday 21 January 2020 

Donald Trump has linked his achievements on the anniversary of being sworn in as president with Martin Luther King Jr‘s birthday, as the he boasted of low unemployment among black Americans.

On Twitter, the US president wrote: “It was exactly three years ago today, January 20, 2017, that I was sworn into office. So appropriate that today is also MLK jr DAY. African-American Unemployment is the LOWEST in the history of our Country, by far. Also, best Poverty, Youth, and Employment numbers, ever. Great!”

Asked how Mr Trump is celebrating this year’s nationwide memorial recognising the murdered civil rights leader, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said the president “agrees with many of the things” Dr King stood for, including “unity and equality”.

Then she pivoted to the president’s upcoming impeachment trial in the Senate, saying: ”He’s not the one trying to tear the country apart.”

Ms Conway said Dr King’s “vision” did not include “Americans dragged through the process where the president is not going to be removed from office”.

The adminisrion listed no public events celebrating Dr King on Monday. The president issued a proclamation on 17 January in advance of the federal holiday, writing that the administration “works each day to ensure that all Americans have every opportunity to realise a better life for themselves and their families regardless of race, class, gender, or any other barriers that have arbitrarily stood in their way”.

Mr Trump and Mike Pence, the vice president, did visit Dr King’s memorial marker in Washington DC. This year, his campaign’s Twitter account posted a photograph showing Mr Trump walking through the memorial – a photo taken at last year’s wreath-laying ceremony – to “honour the life” of Dr King, but it did not disclose that the image was from last year.

His campaign account also juxtaposed images of Dr King with footage of the president appearing with black Americans as part of a fundraising video.

Mr Trump largely spent the day in Washington in 2019 because of a government shutdown that effectively grounded the first family. In 2018, he was in Palm Beach, Florida. He spent this weekend in Florida and Texas, where he addressed the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Ms Conway said she spent the morning “reading some of the lesser-known passages by Dr King” and said that she appreciates that “we as a nation respect him by giving him his own day”.

This morning, the White House issued a message on Twitter, saying the president will “pause to honour the incredible life and accomplishments” of Dr King, who was assassinated on 4 April 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he was addressing striking sanitation workers amid preparations for a Poor People’s Campaign.

Minutes later, the president wrote his support for a “Lobby Day” rally in which thousands of gun rights activists – including far-right militia members – gathered in Virginia to protest gun control legislation in the state.

The president accused Democrats of “working hard to take away” Second Amendment rights. “This is just the beginning. Don’t let it happen, VOTE REPUBLICAN in 2020!”

   Martin Luther King's daughter calls out  Kellyanne Conway for saying her father would oppose Trump's impeachment

The youngest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr has condemned Kellyanne Conway after she claimed that the impeachment of Donald Trump would have been against King's values. 

Speaking to NBC News on Martin Luther King Day, Conway was asked what the president is doing to commemorate the day. In reply, she said:

I can tell you that the president is preparing for Davos and agrees with many of the things that Dr King stood for including unity and equality and he's not the one trying to tear the country apart through an impeachment process and lack of substance which is really very shameful at this point. 

I've held my opinion on it for a very long time but when you see the articles of impeachment that came out, I don't think it was within Dr King's vision to have Americans dragged through a process where the president is not going to be removed from office, is not going to be charged with bribery, extortion or high crimes and misdemeanours.

Conway's egregious and completely baseless comments on King's values sparked a strong reply from Bernice King, who is now the CEO of the King Centre in Atlanta, Georgia. 

The 56-year-old quote retweeted the above video, asking Conway and the Trump administration to refrain from using King's name to somehow justify their own issues. 

Unfortunately, Conway wasn't the only Trump loyalist to invoke King's name on Monday, as a way of almost trying to prove that nothing they have ever said could be interpreted as bigoted. 

Jeff Sessions, a former senator for Alabama and member of the Trump administration tweeted a King quote that said:

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Journalist Britanny Packnett Cunningham then quote retweeted Sessions with a quote from Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr's wife, where she strongly criticised the appointment of Sessions to government. 

As an almost perfect tonic to this level of hypocrisy from modern-day Republicans, Bernice King delivered a speech complaining that due to the resurgence in racism and white supremacism, a day to celebrate the legacy of her father "is not enough."

Watch more
The story behind Martin Luther King Jr Day

 MLK’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech


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