John Lewis Is Everything America Should Be; Trump Is Everything Else
Photo by Astrid Riecken/Getty
“You have sacrificed nothing, and no one,” bellowed Khizr Khan in a packed house in Philadelphia on an August evening at the Democratic National Convention. The target of those words, Donald Trump, would go on to be elected the 45th president of these United States—while learning nothing of decency, class, and manners along the way.
In a country that is prideful of its inherent diversity, Mr. Khan’s speech should have been the moment that the schoolyard bully in an ill-fitting suit campaigning for the White House was defeated by level-headed reasoning and an ethos of unity, not division. Sadly, it was not.
This weekend, Trump decided to pick a fight with a genuine American hero who has made the exact type of sacrifices that Mr. Khan spoke about at the DNC. Congressman John Lewis is the kind of man whose actions should be celebrated within the paragraphs of American textbooks, and not in 140-character tirades from an elected official who can’t seem to take even the slightest criticism.
The entire flap between disgusting PEOTUS and distinguished congressman feels like a real flashpoint in an era that seems filled with uncertainty and confusion. In times like these, our leaders should be uniters, not dividers.
The biggest misnomer of Trump’s tweets is this notion of Lewis being all talk and no action. In fact, that very statement typifies Trump much more than Lewis. As a teenager in the early 1960’s, Lewis joined the Civil Rights movement and was on the front lines with the Rev. Martin Luther King marching for voting and civil rights. Lewis was also there participating in sit-ins, demonstrations, and protests to uphold the Constitution’s statement that all men are, in fact, created equal.
In the interest of comparison, what was Donald Trump doing at the very same time? He was dodging the Vietnam War and working within his father’s real estate empire in New York. The latter practice came with some baseline racism in terms of tenant selection, but Mr. Trump doesn’t want you to remember that—hey, look, Ben Carson is his HUD appointee.
As Congressman Lewis has aged, his track record for activism has remained a key part of his congressional toolkit. When gun control issues kept failing, Lewis mobilized and got a peaceful resistance together in the Congressional chamber. The gun control sit-in last year, while it didn’t end in legislation being passed, did prove something that should never be forgotten—the power of one voice can stand up to a worldview that appeals to the lesser angels of our nature.
In contrast, Trump hasn’t truly taken a principled stance on anything since he’s been moonlighting as a politician. The man twists in the wind more than any political weathervane I have ever seen.
You learn a lot about someone by what they stand for, and all I can think of in terms of what Trump stands for is popularity, deals, and putting his goddamn gold-plated name on every piece of property he owns. Those interests are a triumvirate worth sticking to for someone who’ll enter office with a 37 percent approval rating and big questions about any and all ties to eternal American frenemy, Russia.