Republican likens Trump conviction to the persecution of Black people in 1950s Alabama

A far-right North Carolina congressman and election denier — who's running to become the state's top law enforcement official — this week compared former President Donald Trump's prosecution in New York to the persecution Black Americans faced in 1950s Alabama.

Republican Rep. Dan Bishop, who represents the state's 9th congressional district near Charlotte, told The Pete Kaliner Show in Charlotte that Trump's criminal case "fundamentally rigged" because the case was brought in the 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," he said. "They go into a place where they know the fight is unfair."

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Bishop then compared the former president's case to those experienced by Black Americans in the 1950s in the South, where people of color routinely faced discrimination, harassment, arbitrary arrests and brutality at the hands of 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 said. "And that's what they did in New York. So it was fundamentally rigged."

Trump was convicted last week on all 34 charges in a scheme to unlawfully tilt the 2016 election through a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. With the conviction, he became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes.

A voicemail left Tuesday afternoon with Allie McCandless, a communications director for Bishop, wasn't immediately returned.

Bishop voted to overturn President Joe Biden's election in 2020 following the Jan. 6 riots in Washington, D.C., and has said the Democratic Party "carried out a highly coordinated, massively financed, nationwide campaign to displace state regulation of absentee ballots by means of a flood of election-year litigation."