In a recent New York Times Magazine profile, CNN President Jeff Zucker described his network’s pro-Trump panelists as “characters in a drama.” Thursday morning, one of those characters played exactly to type.
“I want to say something here that I know will probably drive Symone crazy,” Jeffrey Lord said on New Day, referring to his progressive foil Symone Sanders, “but think of President Trump as the Martin Luther King of health care.”
What had started as a discussion over the Trump administration’s threats to cut Obamacare subsidies had suddenly become something very different.
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As host Alisyn Camerota’s eyes widened and Sanders started saying, “Jeffrey” over and over again, Lord explained. “When I was a kid, President Kennedy did not want to introduce the civil rights bill because he said it wasn’t popular, he didn't have the votes for it, et cetera," he added. "Dr. King kept putting people in the streets in harm's way to put the pressure on so that the bill would be introduced. That's what finally worked."
That was all he could get out before Sanders jumped in. “Jeffrey, you do understand that Dr. King was marching for civil rights because people that look like me were being beaten, dogs were being sicced on them, basic human rights were being withheld from these people merely because the color of their skin?” she asked him. "So let's not equate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize winner, to the vagina-grabbing President Donald Trump."
“Oh boy,” Camerota said, laughing as she realized she had more or less lost control of her show.
“No, there is no similarity. What Donald Trump is doing is he’s in over his head. He doesn’t understand that health care is a complicated issue,” Sanders continued as Lord continued to try and make his case. “And he doesn’t understand that these are people’s lives.”
In response, many on Twitter, including one of Lord’s CNN colleagues, employed some analogies of their own to describe the pundit:
