Republican Representative Dan Bishop of North Carolina, a vocal election denier who is currently running to become the state’s top law enforcement official, has made a controversial comparison between former President Donald Trump’s prosecution in New York and the racial persecution faced by Black Americans in 1950s Alabama. Bishop, representing the 9th congressional district near Charlotte, expressed his views on The Pete Kaliner Show in Charlotte, describing Trump’s case as “fundamentally rigged” due to its jurisdiction in a Democratic-leaning state.
“I do believe that the people who are engaging in selective prosecution, vindictive prosecution, using it, doing it, and when I say it’s rigged, it’s not just they don’t go into a fair fight,” Bishop stated. “They go into a place where they know the fight is unfair.”
He further drew parallels to the mid-20th century South, where Black Americans were often subjected to systemic discrimination, harassment, and arbitrary arrests by law enforcement. “It’s as bad as it was in Alabama in 1950 if a person happened to be Black in order to get justice,” Bishop commented, implying that similar injustices were at play in Trump’s legal troubles in New York.
Trump was recently convicted on all 34 charges related to a scheme to unlawfully influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, marking him as the first former U.S. president to be convicted of felony crimes.
Further cementing his stance, Bishop has previously voted to overturn President Joe Biden’s election following the January 6th riots in Washington, D.C. He has accused the Democratic Party of orchestrating a “highly coordinated, massively financed, nationwide campaign to displace state regulation of absentee ballots by means of a flood of election-year litigation.”
The comparison by Bishop has not been without its critics and attempts to reach his communications director, Allie McCandless, for further comments were not immediately successful. This statement from Bishop underscores the deep political and ideological divisions surrounding Trump’s prosecution and the broader implications it has for perceptions of justice and partisanship in the United States.