On Friday night’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher , amidst a panel discussion about the hypocrisy of President Trump and other Republicans in their glowing tributes to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. on the anniversary of his death, well-known conservative columnist and writer Max Boot made the claim that Trump was “the most openly racist president in my lifetime.”
As reported by Raw Story , Boot was responding to a statement by Heather McGhee of Demos , on a panel that also included comedian Louie Anderson and former governor of New York Eliot Spitzer, in which she said that she “wanted to snatch the words ‘Dr. King’ right out of” Donald Trump’s mouth. Boot replied by saying that he “violently agreed” with McGhee.
“I think if Donald Trump were being honest, he would be paying tribute to George Wallace, not Martin Luther King. He is the most openly racist president of my lifetime.”
Boot, who is a prolific writer for both traditionally conservative publications like Foreign Policy , as well as newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post , has become a fierce critic of both President Trump, as well as the modern conservative movement that Trump represents and what Boot called, in a February editorial for the Washington Post , the “boorish and racist performance art of Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter.”
In the same editorial, Boot highly criticized the policies of Trump, as well as a conservatism that has come to include the crazy “Pizzagate” conspiracies of someone like Jack Posobiec, along with the mean spirited nastiness of people like Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham, who, instead of an adherence to small government and fiscal responsibility, have taken to personally attacking the outspoken survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas mass shooting. Boot says that he now prefers to think of himself as a classical liberal, “because ‘conservative’ has practically become synonymous with ‘Trump lackey.’”
Boot, who is the author of The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam , finished out 2017 by writing an editorial for Foreign Policy in which he states that while he had previously thought talk of rampant racism and “white male privilege” in America were nothing but leftist “political correctness” run amok, he now realizes he had been blinding himself to America’s dark side.
He has also warned Republicans and conservatives, in an editorial for the Los Angeles Times , that if you support Trump, you have no choice but to “own his racism, misogyny and amorality too.”
You can watch Boot’s appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher in the video clip below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gQHwRA3jVU