Time to pick the right fight, Mr President

In bringing up the ravages of inner city crime, Donald Trump is highlighting an area where the US has been pretty successful in the past 20 years, writes Timothy L O’Brien

DONALD Trump took to Twitter — surprise, surprise — over the weekend to slam US Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat, for saying that he planned to skip Trump’s upcoming inauguration because he doesn’t consider Trump to be a “legitimate president”.

However ill-considered Trump felt Lewis’s comments to be, the president-elect might have done well to avoid hitting back on this particular weekend. Lewis is an icon of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr Day was yesterday, and Lewis famously marched with King into Selma, Alabama, in 1965 — enduring a brutal police beating and a cracked skull along the way.