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The DNC’s vice chair appeared to liken President Donald Trump to Jim Crow-era segregationists and warned of impending strife during a Philadelphia town hall alongside former Rep. Beto O’Rourke.
Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, D-Philadelphia, who survived a June re-vote of DNC leadership that saw the departure of David Hogg, warmed up the crowd in America’s sixth-largest city by drawing comparisons between the racial strife of the past and Trump’s style of governance.
Speaking about “would-be autocrats and would-be kings,” Kenyatta remarked that “these guys are a–holes, but they’re not super creative.”
He said such “would-be kings” – alluding to Trump – rely on “historical revisionism” in the style of 1930s book-burnings and censorship of websites to “forget who we are as Americans.”
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“This is not, in fact, the first time we’ve had to deal with a guy like the one in the White House,” Kenyatta said.
He said it is key for Americans to remember the protests of female suffragists, civil rights leaders like the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and people who demonstrated at New York’s Stonewall bar for gay rights.
“They found themselves in a moment just like we find ourselves where they didn’t know the end of the story,” the Democratic Party leader went on.
“We now benefit from knowing the end of the story – but what they all knew for certain was that there were dogs at the end of the damn bridge, that there was fire hoses at the bridge, that they were going to be losing their jobs and have to move out of their communities…”
He noted how then-Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Theophilus “Bull” Connor used fire hoses and dogs on civil rights protesters in the mid-20th century.
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“That is where we are right now in our moment of the story. We can see the dogs. We can see the firehoses,” he claimed.
“And we have a guy, whenever he’s not hanging out on Epstein’s Island, who is saying some version of ‘segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’,” he said of Trump.
The latter half of Kenyatta’s sentence referenced former Alabama Democratic Gov. George Wallace’s campaign slogan of the 1960s.
“But I don’t know about each and every one of you, but I am not bowing to a damn king. I’m certainly not kissing the ring of a king,” Kenyatta fumed.
“And we have a bad relationship in Philadelphia with kings, and we’re not changing that relationship now.”
O’Rourke, whose last electoral effort — to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz — failed, told the crowd that Republicans in places like Texas feel too comfortable that they need to “show up for anything” their constituents want.
He pointed to efforts to redistrict mid-decade there, and said Democrats need to take that cue no matter how uncomfortable they might feel about violating norms.
“[S]tates that have the power to do so, that’re led by Democrats right now, must also redistrict to add Democratic advantage; in California where we can pick up some seats,” he said.
“And I know that there are some of you old-line, old-school Democrats — and I used to be one of them — who were like, hey, wait a second, this isn’t right, this is how it’s supposed to work.”
“Well, f— how it supposed to work, we need to win political power,” O’Rourke fumed.
Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for comment.
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