Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY), a member of the Trump transition team, on Monday accused Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) of acting like a “spoiled child” after the civil rights icon suggested that Russia’s interference in the U.S. election undermined the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidency. During a Martin Luther King Jr. Day discussion on Fox Business, network contributor Dagen McDowell took issue with Trump’s Twitter tirade, which accused Lewis of not taking enough action to help his constituents. “My opinion is, what John Lewis is doing, he’s pouting,” Collins opined. “He lost. It’s like a spoiled child and we’ve seen it with the others. They can’t get over the fact that they lost. And what do spoiled little kids do? You know they run around and throw a tantrum.”
“So, what are you saying? You’re actually implying that what Lewis is doing is displaying infantile behavior? Is that where you’re going with this?” McDowell asked Collins. “Look, you can take it any way you want, it doesn’t make a difference,” he replied. “At the end of the day, we’re talking here about a man who’s supposedly responsible for organizing a civil rights revolution or something more than half a century ago, and you would have Americans of all races and ethnicities believe that such a man – someone who’s allegedly responsible for such great things – is today incapable of accepting defeat in a political sense. The two just don’t go together, it’s like trying to mix oil with milk – it just won’t happen.”
Collins continued, “Bottom line, for better or worse, John Lewis is a man who’s had a mediocre career in politics thanks to his alleged heroism in the 1960s. Well, let me tell you one thing – there have been a lot of people over the course of this country’s history that have suffered worse things than beatings by police officers. We’ve had people who were tortured, mutilated, shot, slaughtered, decapitated – you name it and someone in this country has probably suffered it. And yet none of them are mentioned today, and none of them have had political careers built on the foundation of their alleged suffering. And that’s exactly my point – John Lewis is a man who’s been granted too many rights by white people out of fear of retribution. He didn’t become a politician because he could contribute something; he was granted that status to shut him up.”
“And now, when things are finally coming out into the open, he’s having a hard time accepting that his entire so-called career is a failure and that he and those like him lost to a superior politician,” he continued. “To make matters worse – they lost to Donald Trump, who’s not even a career politician to begin with. Ultimately, he can be as upset as he wants, but he’s acting like nothing more than a child – no, scratch that – than a chimp that’s lost one of his bananas and is now throwing a tantrum because of it. But, it’s not his fault, let’s clarify that; the problem is that chimps belong in a zoo and not the House of Representatives. At the end of the day, he shouldn’t be upset – I guess Donald Trump is just too good at snatching bananas off of unsuspecting chimps,” Collins concluded.
