Activist and MSNBC host Al Sharpton sees Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump as the white version of his good friend, Don King.
“The best way I can describe Donald Trump to friends is to say if Don King had been born white he’d be Donald Trump,” Sharpton said in a recent interview with Politico. “Both of them are great self-promoters and great at just continuing to talk even if you’re not talking back at them.”
Sharpton first made the comparison in January, telling the New York Daily News that Trump was running a “great” media campaign and shared striking similarities personality-wise with the widely-known African-American boxing promoter.
King, an animated and controversial figure, spent his career promoting famous boxers like Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson and George Foreman. Many of them later claimed that King had defrauded them and he was forced to settle multiple times in court to avoid incarceration.
“He’s just a bad man, a real bad man,” Tyson reportedly said of King in 2009. “He would kill his own mother for a dollar. He’s ruthless, he’s deplorable, he’s greedy … and he doesn’t know how to love anybody.”
Both King and Trump have developed reputations for their tell-it-like-it-is attitudes and brash comments. Sharpton claims the two businessmen were “friendly” and King was the first to introduce Sharpton to Trump in the 1980s.
“So, Don King had me fly with him and Trump to Atlantic [City] in Trump’s helicopter, and it was one of the most memorable things in my life to sit on a helicopter, big, black Trump helicopter with Don King and Donald Trump, both of them talking nonstop, not listening to each other,” Sharpton told Politico.
The MSNBC personality also noted that while Trump’s “politics has always been right-wing,” he believes the New York billionaire would gradually become more moderate to appeal to voters in a general election.
“He’s … the kind of guy that adjusts and tries to deal with whatever he has to deal with, as he says, to make a deal,” Sharpton said. “There’s no doubt in my mind, if he wins the nomination, that Trump will move to the center.”
