White House public engagement director and Senior Advisor to President Biden, Stephen Benjamin, was asked to respond to the proliferation of online posts comparing the now famous mugshot of former President Donald Trump with the famous mugshot of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., both taken at the Fulton County Jail in Georgia. (Here is King’s letter from the jailhouse.)
Benjamin wasn’t aware of the comparisons, a fact about which he expressed gratitude. Below is an example of what Benjamin was missing, a post that compares the two men as people who “fought for the little guy.”
Today marks the 60th anniversary of MLK's I Have a Dream speech. Here are mugshots of two men who fought for the little guy, got vilified by Federal agents, and, if rumors about their personal lives are true, really really really liked women. pic.twitter.com/K5hbMHhsZl
— Kenny Webster (@KennethRWebster) August 28, 2023
Benjamin, a lawyer, has a long history of public service focused in the South, where he served as Mayor of Columbia, South Carolina from 2010 to 2021 and President of the African American Mayors Association from 2015 to 2016.
Responding from his White House post, Benjamin used the idea that King and Trump could be compared as a jumping off point to encourage America to remember its true history — and the sacrifices that were made not just by King, but by anonymous people whose struggle paved the way for change.
Answering about King and Trump, Benjamin referenced Abraham Lincoln‘s “better angels of our nature” in his stirring response:
I’ve not seen that, and I feel better that I haven’t seen that. The reality is that the sacrifices made by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — and not just him — and A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin and Whitney Young and others ought never be minimized. And — because they not only represent the leaders of the past — I sat with Clarence Jones this weekend and Ambassador Andrew Young and heard some of these stories firsthand — but they represent the sacrifices of so many people we don’t know — people who labored in anonymity who gave everything, who marched and cried and died so that this nation might live up to its better angels, might live up to its promise.
And I think it’s so important that as we look backward, that we work to preserve the importance of that legacy because it’s going to quickly determine how we look forward and determine what America is going to be like not 60 years ago, but 60 years from now.
Stephen Benjamin
White House public engagement director Stephen Benjamin on social media posts comparing Trump's mugshot with MLK's: "I've not seen that and I feel better that I haven't seen that." pic.twitter.com/mnvJIXJD2p
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 28, 2023
At Fox News, media commentator Jessica Tarlov also decried the comparison. “I don’t think…that anyone except the biggest Donald Trump fan is sitting there thinking that that mugshot has anything to do with what it looked like when MLK had his mugshot taken.”
Tarlov went on to offer some recent poll numbers which, if accurate, cast doubt on the effectiveness of Trump’s self-proclaimed martyrdom, saying, “62% think he committed a crime including 67% of independents. 61% think that he must stand trial before the election. 59% think that the DOJ is being fair. That shoots straight through the argument that this is a two-tiered system of justice.”
