Meacham Tweet Compares Trump's Rhetoric to Segregationist Governor's Speech at KKK Convention

Ryan Foley | January 9, 2019
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During Tuesday's edition of The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell, the eponymous host asked historian Jon Meacham to address a tweet he sent out earlier in the evening, featuring a quote from Georgia Governor Clifford Walker at a 1924 Ku Klux Klan Convention, who argued that America should "build a wall of steel, a wall as high as Heaven."  Meacham concluded the tweet with the hashtag #PastIsPrologue, an obvious attempt to compare President Trump to a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer. O'Donnell argued that Meacham's tweet proved that the "anti-immigrant wall concept has been around for a while." According to Meacham, "ferocious anti-immigrant sentiment...goes all the way back to 1798 when we passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Anti-immigrant sentiment ebbs and flows. Right now, it's flowing. The interesting question is, to what extent is it genuinely flowing beyond the fevered precincts of the President and his base?"  Meacham predicted that the government shutdown will come to an end when Republican politicians realize that "the Fox News world in which so much of the right wing lives is not, in fact, where the country is in 2018."

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