Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) on Tuesday said that White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is “a white supremacist type” who Martin Luther King Jr. would be “very disappointed” to see employed by a president.
“Congressman, as you know well, today is the 49th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King,” MSNBC’s Willie Geist asked. “What is the state of Dr. King’s dream?”
“I think if Dr. King were here, and I guess that’s the best way to answer that, I think he would be a bit disappointed,” Cummings said.
He said that King “would have been pleased” to see Barack Obama’s election as the first black president, but said King would be “very disappointed” to see Bannon employed in the West Wing.
“When we see a guy like Bannon who is, as far as I’m concerned, a white supremacist type person, sitting in the White House, sitting in the White House and I’m paying his salary, I think he’d be very disappointed,” Cummings said. “I think he’d be disappointed with all the hate talk that we are hearing now, and the climate that we find ourselves in.”
He said that “as a preacher” King would likely “have a sense of hope.”
“But I can tell you that as I get older, I’m tired of African-American people and others fighting the same battles over and over and over again,” Cummings said. “Just the right to vote being attacked, I think he would be very upset about that. I mean, we thought that battle was finished.”
