Trump’s Coronation on Martin Luther King Day

On January 20, 2025, we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Day and witness the second inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

We may expect Trump to acknowledge MLK Day in his inauguration speech, and in some way misconstrue what MLK stood for. As his administration did during his presidency, Trump might describe him as a patriot who would agree with the need to “Make America Great Again.” But considering what MLK truly stood for, we know he would be opposing Trump and all the racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic ideas he used to build his campaign.

MLK became known due to his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement of the of the 1950s and ‘60s, when thousands of people, especially Black working-class folks, organized to end Jim Crow segregation in the South. MLK, alongside many great leaders of the movement like Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker, challenged the South’s racist policies and empowered people around them to view themselves as changemakers in society. Like some of his contemporaries, later in his life MLK also began to organize outside the scope of the Civil Rights Movement, and questioned more of what was accepted as status quo.

Following the leadership of anti-war activist Coretta Scott King, MLK began speaking out against the Vietnam War in 1967. He criticized the U.S.’s involvement in fights to supposedly protect democracy and freedom, while the U.S. government had not done so within its own borders. He explained in the “Beyond Vietnam” speech that the U.S. government was “taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem”

He also expressed solidarity with other movements in the U.S. For example, when migrant farmworkers in California went on strike in 1968 to protest years of poor pay and working conditions, MLK sent a telegram to one of the leaders, Cesar Chavez, explaining “Our separate struggles are really one. A struggle for freedom, for dignity and for humanity.” During this time, in the last year of his life, MLK began shifting his focus to address economic issues more broadly. He planned the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, which was a national occupation of Washington, D.C. built on the idea that everyone should have their basic needs met. It was a multi-racial effort. Groups from the American Indian, Puerto Rican, Chicano, and poor white communities engaged actively in the campaign. MLK’s activity gives insight into shifts of his own understanding of the world and inequality.

In the last months of his life, MLK linked poverty to capitalism directly and argued that people had to challenge the organization of society. In a speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta, Georgia, MLK said, “Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society.”

These last actions demonstrate that MLK began to understand that the struggles of poor and oppressed people both within the United States and abroad stemmed from capitalism and suggested that fights for freedom would be most powerful when working people stood together.

The coincidence of Donald Trump taking office on MLK Day is a reminder that the fight for a just society is not finished. Decades after the assassination of MLK, we still live under a racist, capitalist system that MLK and his contemporaries fought against. Many people are in poverty, and many more are at risk of falling below the poverty line this year. The U.S. is sending military aid to support genocide in Palestine in order to maintain its imperial interests in the Middle East. Racism is still strong: politicians like Trump use racism to further divide working people. Additionally, communities of color continue to be the ones most impacted by poverty and violence from the state through police brutality, as well as the inaccessibility of safe and decent housing, health care, quality education, and more.

Trump will not address any of these issues. In fact, his plans to cut budgets of existing social services will exacerbate inequalities further. Working people, including people who voted for him, will face the brunt of these cuts and real material changes for the worse. At the same time, we cannot look to the Democratic Party for solutions. Some of its politicians might say that they are for the rights of oppressed people, as we saw Harris do during her campaign. But when crises really hit, they will fail to organize for them. Their track record shows that we cannot put any faith in them either: they began as a party of slave owners and have failed to meet any of their more recent promises. Biden, who campaigned under the slogan of “no more drilling,” gave out a record number of drilling permits on federal land, paving the way for more pollution of our environment. On the topic of immigration, the Biden administration continued Trump’s approach, arresting and deporting record numbers of immigrants. Despite claiming the title of “proud pro-labor President,” Biden and his administration outright disrespected worker’s fights in the last year fours. Notably, in 2022, they threatened railroad workers protesting their unsafe working conditions, and successfully blocked them from striking. Last but not least, the Democratic Party failed to protect reproductive rights: rather than codifying access to reproductive care at a national level, they took a backseat and just watched as states began taking steps to restrict access to abortion.

The situation is clear: we can only rely on ourselves to bring about the changes that our society so desperately needs. Our fight today must include defending ourselves from attacks on our rights. But our efforts must not end there. We must organize ourselves so that we never have to face threats like Trump again. For that, we must be part of building organizations genuinely rooted in the working class that ultimately fight to end capitalism and transform society to one where we are making the decisions affecting our livelihoods, our climate, our health, and the distribution of resources overall. We deserve such a world, and the fight to get there is important now more than ever!

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