Martin Luther King III on Monday excused president-elect Donald Trump for insulting civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis as “all talk, talk, talk — no action or results," arguing that “things get said on both sides” in the heat of emotion.
The eldest son of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., met with the president-elect at his Trump Tower office on the national holiday celebrating his father's birthday — a symbolically significant meeting for Trump, who is days away from taking office with historically low approval ratings, and who was overwhelmingly rejected by African-American voters across the country in the November election.
After the sit down, King emerged into the marble lobby of the Tower with Trump, shaking hands. King called the meeting “constructive.”
The meeting came together against a backdrop of a brewing feud between Trump and Lewis, the George representative who became the president-elect’s latest Twitter target after he said in an interview with “Meet The Press” last week that he does not consider Trump “a legitimate president.”
Lewis, a former Freedom Rider who was beaten bloody by state troopers in Alabama while marching for voting rights five decades ago, said he is planning to boycott Friday’s inauguration. After Trump insulted Lewis via Twitter, accusing him of being all talk and no action, and representing a district "in horrible shape," more Democratic lawmakers announced they would be joining Lewis in the boycott.
But on Monday, King appeared to give Trump a pass on the outrage-stirring comments.
“Absolutely I would say John Lewis has demonstrated that he is action,” King told reporters camped out in the lobby of Trump Tower. But he added that "things get said on both sides in the heat of emotion. And at some point in this nation we’ve got to move forward … We need to be talking about how do we feed people, how do we clothe people, how do we create the best educational system, that’s what we need to be focused on.”
William Wachtel, the founder of the Drum Major Institute — a progressive think tank where King currently serves as president — also attended the meeting. He hinted that they had been able to push King’s long-running campaign to establish a free, photo identification card issued by the government that would make it easier for all Americans to vote. Watchtel noted that “this president may well” be able to help “make it easy for all Americans to vote.” He said that Trump had committed to them that he would work with them on a plan so that “all people can vote.”
During the campaign, Trump said he did not support same-day voter registration. And his pick for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, has called the Voting Rights Act "a piece of intrusive legislation.”
In an op-ed published Friday in the Washington Post, King III wrote that: “Many people are concerned that our new president could undo much of what the outgoing president has achieved. But in the area of voting rights, I am the opposite of concerned; I am hopeful in recognition that there is an opportunity to build a better system.”
When pressed on whether Trump will be able to represent Americans of all skin colors, King said that it is up to Americans to “consistently engage with pressure, public pressure” to hold him accountable.
When asked to step in as a spokesman for his late father, King said his father would have wanted to speak to Trump about poverty in America. “I think my father would be very concerned about that fact that we have 50 to 60 million people living in poverty, and somehow we gotta create the climate for all boats to be lifted,” he said. “It’s insanity that we have poor people in this nation. That’s unacceptable.”