Donald Trump and Don King, the controversial boxing promoter, have been close since they teamed up to bring Mike Tyson fights to Trump’s Atlantic City casino decades ago. Knowing that it’s no surprise that King was one of Trump’s only celebrity supporters and claims to still see and speak to the President regularly, including during Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago this past year.
King recently sat down with Politico for an interview about how he thinks his buddy is doing and about their relationship. It’s filled with the sort of turns of phrase and soundbites that made King famous. When asked how he thinks he’s doing, King sounds a lot like his buddy, saying that the media is not focused on his actual job performance, but rather investigations about Russian interference in the election:
“He’s doing an excellent job, but it’s hard to evaluate because they don’t talk about nothing but Russia. … For over a year, without a shred of evidence — and this is what resonates with the lumpen proletariat and the common people. They’ve been hearing from these ingenious organizations of the world — the CIA, the FBI. … Everybody is saying all these things, these brilliant minds … but ain’t nobody come up with no evidence.”
King hits on a few relevant points, like how Trump has loyalty and keeps promises to people even if maintaining that loyalty or keeping thoese promises aren’t exactly practical, such as Trump’s continued fondness for Michael Flynn (“That’s not crooked, that’s not obstructing justice, that’s friendship.”) or the promises he made to coal miners. However the money quote comes when King is asked specifically what it is that the two talk about when King gets in touch about an urgent matter:
I tell him that the establishment will tell their lies. They will try to keep him down. … I tell him, ‘Now Mr. Trump, they’re treating you like a black man.’… I say, ‘Mr. President, you know what it’s like to be a black man. … No matter what you say or do, you are guilty as hell.’
As Death and Taxes points out, if Trump knew what it was like to be a black man, he wouldn’t have called for the Central Park Five to be executed, and he definitely wouldn’t have done it in a full-page ad in a major metropolitan newspaper before the groups’ trials even began.
Elsewhere in the interview, King says he’s worried that Trump will be assassinated because he is such a “revolutionary” figure like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and John F. Kennedy. This is apparently another thing the two have talked about.
Head over to Politico to read the whole thing. There are details about King’s opinion of Reince Priebus, his qualifications for Secretary of State, as well as observations about King’s country estate featuring an unused tennis court and “Amish housekeepers.”
(Via Politico & Death & Taxes)