On January 20, 2025, we experience a political planetary alignment of sorts. Though his birthday was on January 15, the United States will commemorate Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s national holiday. Following the recent death of Jimmy Carter, our 39th President, flags throughout the nation – including in Washington, D.C., over the Capitol, White House, and other public buildings – will remain at half-staff.
The official inauguration of the nation’s 47th president, Donald John Trump, will also be held.
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And here, the confluence ends. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dedicated his entire life to promoting peace and civil rights for people of color and other marginalized groups. He based his actions on his assertion that, “There can be no justice without peace, and there can be no peace without justice.”
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On December 14, 1967, Dr. King chanted these words outside a California prison that was holding Vietnam War protesters. In his commitment and passion for justice, and in his inimical and profound way, he understood several connecting strands: “I see these two struggles as one struggle.”
King argued that by fighting a war “against the self-determination of the Vietnamese people,” the United States of America had been proliferating injustice. Fighting for the rights of people in his home nation without opposing what King believed to be the clear exploitation of the Vietnamese people would have contradicted his declaration that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Dr. King’s late wife, Coretta Scott King, remarked at the 2000 National LGBTQ Task Force Creating Change Conference: “My husband, Martin Luther King Jr., once said, ‘We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny… an inescapable network of mutuality… I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be.’ Therefore, I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.”
Dr. King is one of countless social justice activists across the planet, some known and some unrecognized. They have placed their values and their very lives on the line to ensure a better, more peaceful, and equitable world for themselves and their descendants.
Jimmy Carter came to this work later in his life, having been raised in the segregated, racist environment of the Jim Crow South. Through his deep religious faith, he became one of the most forward-thinking and acting of all our presidents in the advancement of human and civil rights throughout the world.
“The time for racial discrimination is over,” Carter declared on the steps of the Georgia State Capitol after becoming that state’s 76th governor. “No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”
Prior to serving as governor, Carter was a Georgia state senator from 1963 to 1967. During that time, he worked to repeal laws that made it harder for Black people to vote. His anti-racism and pro-integration stances were likely what caused him to lose his first campaign for Georgia governor in 1966.
Carter won his bid to become governor in 1970, serving from 1971 to 1975. During his term, Black appointees on Georgia state boards and agencies rose from three to 53, and he increased the overall number of Black state employees by 25%.
While serving as the nation’s 39th president from 1977 to 1981, Carter made human rights and peace both at home and abroad a central issue. He was instrumental in the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, which became one of his greatest achievements.
On January 20, 1977, he stated in his inaugural address: “Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere. Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights.”
Following his presidency, Carter supported and volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, a Georgia-based organization that builds homes for those in need all over the world. He created the Carter Center and went on missions across the globe to negotiate the end of conflicts, prevent disease, advance human rights and economic development, and promote democratic principles.
In 2002, Jimmy Carter became the second Georgian to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The first was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1964.
Dr. King and Carter worked for a world with a more level playing field between people of every identity and background and for a world with a safety net to catch people who have hit tough times and meet the needs of people with limited abilities.
Because of their courageous dedication to the concept of fairness and justice in the relationship between the individual and the state and also between states – and in their devotion to obliterating the barriers of social mobility by working actively for equality of opportunity and economic justice – they have given us so much and have served as positive role models for every generation.
The only tangential connection in the lives of Dr. King and Trump is the fact that they were both convicted for breaking established laws.
Acting on his philosophy of “nonviolence” based on his studies of forward thinkers like Gandhi, Tolstoy, and Thoreau, Dr. King and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy led a march in defiance of an injunction against civil rights demonstrations, and they were arrested on April 12, 1963. During his eight days in jail, King wrote his now-famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
On the topic of civil disobedience, King wrote: “An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”
Trump, on the other hand, was charged with four criminal indictments and convicted of 34 felony counts in his so-called “hush money” case. Two indictments were on state charges (one in New York and one in Georgia) and two indictments (as well as one superseding indictment) were on federal charges (one in Florida and one in the District of Columbia).
Due to his victory in the 2025 presidential election a well as the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States that a president cannot be held criminally liable for conducting “official actions” while in office, three of the four indictments were reversed. Though he remains a convicted felon as determined by a jury of his peers, he received no penalties for his 34-count conviction.
Prior to his entry into politics, Trump and his father, Fred Trump, were convicted of perpetrating racial discrimination by refusing to rent their properties to Black people, over which they were sued and eventually signed a consent decree.
Dr. King opposed and violated unjust and discriminatory laws on high moral and ethical grounds to advance the cause of peace and justice. Trump, however, opposed and violated just and fair laws to advance his own greed, prejudice, lust, and power.
Once identifying himself as a Democrat, Trump has transformed himself, at the very least, into the mouthpiece of the far-right and white Christian nationalists.
In political terms, a “strongman” is one who leads by force within an overarching authoritarian, totalitarian, dictatorial regime. Sometimes the formal head of state and sometimes another political or military leader, the strongman exerts more influence and control over the government than traditional laws or constitutional mandates sanction.
On the right-wing side of the dictatorial strongman’s political spectrum, we find the philosophy and practice of “fascism.” While also deployed as an epithet by some, fascism developed as a form of radical authoritarian nationalism in early 20th-century Europe in response to liberalism and Marxism on the left.
We have evidence of the ways Trump “governed” during his first term in office, and if prelude is any indication, his second term promises to be more extreme and detrimental to all people outside of the oligarchal class.
Trump represents the opposite extreme of the moral and ethical words and actions advanced by Dr. King and President Carter.
Trump appeals to “nationalism,” presented in the guise of “popularism.” He feeds on people’s fears and prejudices, a tactic that has already resulted in the segregation of people and nations from one another, along with threats of violence and actual violence.
He has promises to continue rolling back many of the rights and protections marginalized people have tirelessly fought for: reproductive rights, voting rights, citizenship rights, anti-torture guarantees, rights of unreasonable search and seizure, rights of assembly, disability rights, freedom of religion, transgender rights and bodily autonomy, and possibly marriage equality.
He scapegoats already disenfranchised identity categories as the internal and external enemies of the United States: Muslims and anyone from Muslim-majority countries, Mexicans and all Latinx people, urban “thugs,” the press, the ACLU, liberals, “illegal aliens,” transgender people, Democrats, etc.
His toxic, misogynistic utterances and allegations of sexual harassment by numerous women have reached historic proportions.
He continually threatens to destroy the country’s “Fourth Estate” by employing libel laws to sue the “crooked and lying” media (Lügenpresse, “lying press” popularized by the German Nazis to silence opposition).
His continual cries against “Islamic jihadist terrorists” as a major threat to our nation exposes U.S. Muslims to increased calls for a “national registry” and surveillance to track their movements.
Trump’s attendance at several Christian prayer vigils and appearances at right-wing Christian conferences and universities gives a subliminal battling cry to make America white and Protestant again.
His increased promises to deregulate corporate business sectors with massive tax cuts and other financial incentives, such as continuing massive tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, will increase the already overwhelming income and wealth gaps between the super-rich and everyone else in the United States.
Under Trump’s second term, we will most likely see the privatization of entitlements, advocacy for the abolition of a national minimum wage and a minimum yearly income above the poverty level, and a reduction in the rights of workers to organize and negotiate collective bargaining agreements.
Assisted by the larger Republican party and the Supreme Court gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights law, we will see an increase in voter suppression campaigns, effectively reducing the number of polling stations in primarily marginalized communities and limiting days and times for pre-election-day voting.
So, on January 20, 2025, I will be remembering the higher moral standards set by President Jimmy Carter and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
As Trump places his hand on the Bible atop the U.S. Capitol and perjures himself for a second time in taking the oath “to faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,” I will be rereading King’s historic, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which declares that “Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever.”
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