CNN’s Don Lemon blasted political commentator Jeffrey Lord for comparing President Trump to civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., calling the comments “insulting” and “not in reality” before cutting him off completely.
Lord doubled down on his previous comments during “CNN Tonight,” suggesting that King Jr. wasn’t the first person to use his particular tactic.
“The objective is to so disrupt that you get the other side to negotiate to an agreement,” Lord said.
Lemon clearly disagreed, “Jeffrey… I’m talking real. This is real. I’m talking human.”
The “CNN Tonight” host continued: “It’s insulting when you are stating something that is not in reality…. Dr. King means something different to the people sitting here than he meant to you. He wasn’t just a tactic for us. He was a real person who helped me to be able to get here.”
Lemon said the comparison was “reckless” before cutting Lord off.
“Think of President Trump as the Martin Luther King of health care,” Lord said earlier on Thursday as fellow CNN political commentator Symone Sanders looked absolutely dumbfounded during a spot on “New Day.”
He asserted that civil rights legislation was only introduced in the 1960s because of King “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.”
Much like Lemon, Sanders was also quick to shut down the outrageous comparison of a civil rights activist with a sitting U.S. president.
“Jeffrey, you do understand that Dr. King was marching for civil rights because people that looked like me were being beaten,” she quickly responded. “Dogs were being sicked on them. Basic human rights were being withheld from these people merely because the color of their skin.
“So let’s not equate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize winner, to the vagina-grabbing President Donald Trump.”
Check out the video above.