John Lewis: Trump administration ‘is a major setback’ for the nation, world

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) called President Trump’s administration a “major setback” to progress in the United States and the country while speaking on David Letterman’s new Netflix talk show.

“Without being just flat-out specific about this, how big a setback is the current administration?” Letterman asks Lewis in the interview.

“It is a major setback to the hopes, the dreams and aspirations of a people,” Lewis, 77, replies. “Not just African-Americans, but all Americans. Because I think what has happened in America today is a threat not just to our own country, but to the planet.” {mosads}

Lewis, who was a key civil rights leader in the 1960s as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, has been a frequent critic of Trump and refused to attend his inauguration.

The taped segment between Lewis and Letterman was filmed as the two walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where Lewis was beaten and arrested during a civil rights march in 1965. 

Letterman also interviewed former President Obama on his talk show this week. The former president opened up about everything from racism to sending his daughter off to college.

“It turns out that we come up with all kinds of reasons to try to put ourselves over other people,” Obama said. “Racism is a profound example of that, but obviously biologically there’s no actual reality to it other than we made this thing up. We made it up.”