Trump Assesses John Lewis’s Legacy: ‘He Didn’t Come to My Inauguration’

“Again, nobody has done more for Black Americans than I have,” he said. “He should have come. I think he made a big mistake.”

Mr. Trump declined to say whether he found Mr. Lewis’s life story “impressive.” He seemed indifferent to renaming the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., after the congressman. The bridge, named after a former Confederate general, Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan and senator, was the site of a turning point in the civil rights movement that became known as Bloody Sunday.

On that day, March 7, 1965, Mr. Lewis suffered a cracked skull during a march across the bridge when a state trooper clubbed him and beat him to the ground. The moment was a defining one in his life and in the civil rights movement. Mr. Trump, in the Axios interview, suggested there “were many others also” whose work should be praised.

Days before Mr. Trump took office in 2017, Mr. Lewis questioned the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s victory and said he would not be in attendance when the president-elect traveled to the Capitol to be sworn in.

“I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected,” Mr. Lewis said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. I don’t plan to attend the inauguration. It will be the first one that I miss since I’ve been in the Congress. You cannot be at home with something that you feel that is wrong, is not right.”