During a panel discussion on birtherism last Friday night on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, guest Mark Thompson suggested Donald Trump’s response to President Obama’s citizenship was racism on the level of slavery. Thompson, a liberal SiriusXM host and contributor to the Huffington Post, called Trump one of “the most despicable candidates in history” who’s “trying to re-litigate the 14th Amendment.”
O’Donnell started the segment Friday by blasting Trump’s non-apology for his “first big political lie” after Trump came out to the press and affirmed that the President was born in Hawaii. O’Donnell asked Thompson what his “reaction” was to Trump’s admission on “what the rest of us knew for many, many, years now.”
Thompson began by calling Trump’s statement, “pure theater” and “very, very disturbing” before diving into a rant on the racism behind questioning President Obama’s birth certificate, comparing it to trying to take away the 14th Amendment.
Thompson has made these type of extreme statements before. On Last Word in 2015 he said, “We’re seeing history repeat itself” comparing voter I.D. laws to lynching.MARK THOMPSON: Pure theater on the part of Donald Trump, and, you know, he bragged about how he finished it and you know what I mean. Still, very, very disturbing.
What Donald Trump did was attack the president, attack all Americans, attack all citizens, attack African-Americans. What he said today is not enough. He needs to apologize to president Obama and the American people for trying to re-litigate the 14th amendment, for reminding us all how we've been discriminated against as African-Americans in this country for centuries, before we had citizenship, and how our citizenship has always been questioned, even down to the birth certificate.
You know, Ossie Davis used to tell the story about how his mother named him RC, but the clerk put Ossie on the birth certificate. Many of our names on our birth certificates are wrong for that reason. Our names, after all are not our names anyway. So to do what he’s done for at least the past five years, to question the president’s citizenship, to make him "Other." To remind us, invalidate the words of Ralph Ellison that we are invisible men and women, to validate the words, of W.E. Du Bois, our irreconcilable strivings. And then to attack Hillary Clinton.
When women after all, full citizenship, is suffrage and the right to vote. Women after all, only second generation citizens in this country. And here you have a woman, running, succeeding in the spirit of someone like Shirley Chisholm.
He has insulted so many people. Donald Trump is probably one of the most despicable candidates in history.
And lastly, I'll say the new Museum of African-American History and Culture is about to be opened. Donald Trump's picture, if it goes in that museum should be right there alongside slavers, should be right there along those who’ve always questioned our citizenship, made us prove we could recite the constitution before we voted. All of those things. Donald Trump is not about making America great again, he's about making America the worst again.
