WASHINGTON — US President-elect Donald Trump lashed out on Saturday at a prominent civil rights icon and lawmaker who said he is skipping next week’s inauguration ceremony because he sees the New York businessman’s election as illegitimate.
Trump aimed his latest Twitter blast at longtime congressman John Lewis and the majority-black district in Georgia he represents, drawing widespread criticism just days before the holiday honoring the slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
Lewis, whose district includes Atlanta and surrounding areas, on Friday became the highest-profile Democratic lawmaker to boycott Trump’s inauguration.
“I don’t see this president-elect as a legitimate president,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” talk show in an interview on Friday.
Trump fired back at him early on Saturday.
“Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results,” Trump said on Twitter.
“All talk, talk, talk — no action or results. Sad!“
He followed up later in the evening with a tweet repeating his campaign theme that African Americans are living in desperately grim inner-city areas where they lack education and jobs.
Lewis “should finally focus on the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the US,” he said. “I can use all the help I can get!“
Known for his decades of work in the civil rights movement, Lewis, 76, marched with King at the August 1963 rally in Washington at which King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.
The son of sharecroppers, Lewis took part in the Freedom Rides — challenges to segregated facilities at bus terminals in the South.
On March 7, 1965, he led a march in Selma, Alabama that ended in an attack by state troopers on the protesters that later became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
In his interview with NBC, Lewis cited what he called Russian interference in the Nov. 8 election as his reason for skipping the presidential inauguration for the first time since becoming a member of Congress in 1987.
Lewis earned a flood of support from Democratic colleagues — and a few Republicans — on Twitter.
Meanwhile, some 2,000 demonstrators, the majority of them black, marched in Washington on Saturday to the park near the Martin Luther King Memorial in the city’s first major protest ahead of Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
Some chanted, “We will not be Trumped.”
“We won’t go back,” said civil rights leader Al Sharpton, calling on marchers to fight to defend the accomplishments of Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House.
“We want this nation to understand what has been fought for and gained,” he added. “You are going to need more than one election to turn it around.” — AFP
