Protesters calling for end to coronavirus shutdown are ‘modern-day Rosa Parks’ says Trump advisor

A member of Donald Trump’s task force to reopen America’s economy has compared protesters calling for an end to coronavirus shutdowns to the civil rights icon Rosa Parks.

Stephen Moore, a conservative economist and longtime advisor to the president, made the comparison to three different news outlets as small-scale protests spread across the country.

“I think there’s a boiling point that has been reached and exceeded,” Mr Moore, who has been outspoken in his desire to relax stay-at-home orders, told the Washington Post.

“I call these people the modern-day Rosa Parks — they are protesting against injustice and a loss of liberties,” Mr Moore said of the protesters. He made similar remarks to the New York Times and CBS News.

Protests calling for an end to stay-at-home orders have broken out in a number of state capitals across the US in the past week, in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Minnesota, North Carolina and Utah - states led by both Republican and Democratic governors. Mr Trump had given his tacit support to the protesters.

“When you look at what they’ve been through, when you look at all of the death and all of the problems and all of the sickness, when you look at what’s happened, I just think the American people have been incredible,” he said at a White House briefing on Friday.

“They seem to be protesters that like me and respect this opinion, and my opinion is just the same as about all of the governors. They all wanna open – nobody wants to stay shut, but they wanna open safely,” he added.

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Mr Moore, who wrote a book called ‘Trumponomics’ on the economic policies of the president and was considered to sit on the board of the Federal Reserve in the Trump administration, has come under fire in the past for making controversial comments about race.

"There's that great cartoon going along, that The New York Times headline: 'First thing Donald Trump does as President is kick a black family out of public housing,'" Mr Moore said at a 2016 event shortly after Trump's election. "And it has Obama leaving the White House. I mean, I just love that one."

One of the largest of the protests, organised by a hard-right grassroots group called the Michigan Conservative Coalition, saw crowds of people tote guns and block the state capital’s streets to demand stay-at-home orders be lifted.

Thousands assembled outside of the Michigan state capitol building on 15 April, many displaying firearms and wearing “Make America Great Again” hats or waving Trump flags.

They claim Michigan's lockdown has gone too far and say they are “fed up” with Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer’s “radical, progressive agenda”, which they say has allowed “dope stores” to stay open while small businesses remain closed.

Michigan is one of the hardest-hit states in the US, with nearly 30,000 cases and more than 2,000 deaths confirmed so far. Governor Whitmer has become something of a bete noire on the right since she imposed some of the country’s strongest social distancing orders, which members of the protest group have described as “tyranny”.

Ms Parks, often described as the mother of the civil rights movement, sparked a nationwide movement when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955, violating US segregation laws.