Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich denounced Donald Trump as a “bully” in a Facebook that cites Reich’s relationship with a civil rights hero murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan, the racist group Trump recently refused to condemn.
In a post Saturday, Reich, who served as the 22nd labor secretary under President Bill Clinton, said he has a “particular relationship with bullies.”
Reich said that as a boy, in part because he is short, he targeted by bullies, but sometimes protected by “kinder older boys,” including Mickey Schwerner. Schwerner joined the 1960s civil rights movement, and was killed in 1964 in Mississippi along with two other civil rights workers by the Ku Klux Klan as they were registering black voters. The murders helped galvanize the movement.
“When I heard that the young man who had protected me from my bullies had himself been killed by truly monstrous bullies, my life forever changed,” Reich said.
“Donald Trump is a bully who’s stirring up other bullies to rage against Latinos, blacks, Muslims, and other convenient scapegoats — channeling the fears and resentments of the white working class into hatefulness and violence,” Reich said. “He deserves to be condemned by every decent American.”
The post likened Trump to the racist bullies who killed the civil rights workers and his opponents to those who opposed the Klan.
The businessman, who currently leads the Republican field, has called some Mexican immigrants “racists,” urged banning Muslims from entering the country and declared that “Islam hates us.” On Friday and into the weekend, the tension surrounding his campaign came to a boiling point amid fallout over Trump’s canellation of a rally in Chicago due to clashes between protesters and Trump backers.
Reich endorsed Bernie Sanders from president in February because he sees the Vermont senator as “leading a movement to reclaim America for the many, not the few.”
