John Wilkes Booth "could be the poster child for the tea party," Erik Jendresen, executive producer of National Geographic Channel's "Killing Lincoln," said at Winter TV Press Tour 2013.
Booth was not mad, and his views were pretty common when he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, Jendresen said Friday. "This is a man who believed what still probably 20 percent of this country still believes."
"Killing Lincoln," a two-hour special, is an adaptation of a book by Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly.
"If you look at the politics of the time, and the epithets that were being hurled at Lincoln, there is a feeling in the nation that is not dissimilar to the past four years of Barack Obama's presidency — the idea today of this imperial presidency . . . [of] somebody who is essentially going to declare himself king and take over," Jendresen said.