TWO KINGS

Yesterday was January 20, 2025.

Because it was the third Monday in January, it was a national holiday set aside to honor Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. Because of the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, it was also the day the President of the United States takes office. Because of a whole host of factors that cumulatively give notice to the potential for perversion overtaking our politics in this first quarter of the twenty-first century, it was also the day that Donald Trump became America's 47th President.

The contrast between Dr. King and Donald Trump could not be greater. 

King preached non-violence in the service of justice and optimistically held that, while "the arc of the moral universe is long," it "bends toward justice." When he delivered his famous "I Have A Dream" speech before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, however, he was much more  focused on "the fierce urgency of now" than on that arc. 

"This is not the time," King said, "to engage in the luxury of cooling off or the tranquilizing drug of gradualism."  In fact, he argued, it was time for the exact opposite, warning America that it would "be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment", that the country would "have a rude awakening" if it "return[ed] to business as usual."

He did not base his predicted "awakening" on fact-free rhetoric.

Nor was his eloquence spun out of  dystopian fiction.

For the hundred years that had passed since Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, King explained, the nation had "defaulted" on the "promissory note to which every American was . . . heir." That "note was a promise that all men . . . would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."  

"Instead of honoring that sacred obligation," however, "America ha[d] given the Negro people a bad check, a check that ha[d] come back marked 'insufficient funds.'"

This would not do.

"We refuse to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt," he asserted. "We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation."

So, he concluded . . .

"We have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice."

Most of us remember Dr. King's speech because of what followed. 

His dream  . . .

Laid out in five stanzas.

It was a dream . . .

Where America "will . . . live out the true meaning of its creed . . . that all men are created equal'";

Where Georgia's former slaves and former slave owners will "sit down at the table of brotherhood";

Where Mississippi's "heat of oppression" will be "transform[ed] into an oasis of freedom and justice";

Where "one day", even "in Alabama with its vicious racists", black and white children will be able to join hands "as sisters and brothers"; and

Where his "children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Lots of Americans think King's dream has been fulfilled.

Americans of color, however, know it has not.

They earn less, get sicker, die sooner and are arrested more often than their white countrymen.  They pay more for their houses, their food, their cars and their clothes.  They do not get to fail up. Their history is either denied or suppressed. And, worst of all, remedies are now deemed racist so they can then be rescinded.

The check has not yet cleared.

Perhaps the best evidence of how far we have not come was also on display yesterday in the Inauguration of Donald Trump as America's 47th President.

One of the un-sung (and often un-noticed) portions of Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech is the message he delivered to his fellow sufferers:

"There is something I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads to the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."

Whatever else can be said of Donald Trump, it is certainly the case that he could have never credibly uttered those words.  

For the entire nine years of his political career, bitterness and hatred have been his closest allies. He lives in their world, forever using the former to stoke the latter and vice versa. Far from rejecting violence as a means to any political end, he has advocated it. 

In his campaigns he has more than once encouraged supporters to beat up their opponents and on January 6, 2021, he incited a riot designed to overthrow the 2020 election he lost (and to this day has refused to concede)  and then stood by silently and refused to call off the violence.  The Capitol was ransacked.  The electoral vote count was stopped.

Five people died.

Yesterday, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,600 J6 convicts, including those who had violently attacked the police and others who were serving decades long  sentences for seditious conspiracy on account of their efforts to effectively orchestrate a violent coup and keep him in the White House.

Earlier in the day, he had issued a firehose of executive orders, one of which declared a national emergency at the southern border. Another cancelled the appointments of over 27,000 whose asylum hearings had been scheduled. A third purports to end birthright citizenship.

The last of these directives is almost certainly unconstitutional.  The 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship, no executive order can eliminate it, and today eight states and the District of Columbia sued to stop the Trump Administration from denying it. In explaining their lawsuit, New Jersey's attorney general noted that presidents, though powerful, are not kings. 

As to asylum, Trump cannot end it but he can (and now has) complicate it. The app through which the Biden Administration had allowed asylum hearings to be scheduled has been shut down and 27,000 whose appointments through it were cancelled must now find a new way.  As for the newly declared southern border emergency, it does not exist. In fact, illegal crossings there are at a four-year low. Of course, eliminating the CBP One app may increase illegal crossings and thus create the not-yet-existing emergency Trump's order (falsely) asserts to be upon us.

Everyone knows Trump is a pathological liar and yesterday was no different. 

Fact checkers had a field day with his twenty-nine minute Inaugural Address and follow-on extemporaneous comments throughout the day. 

He repeated all his standard lies -- the ones about Biden having indicted him (Biden didn't), foreigners paying tariffs (they don't), the border being overrun by illegals released from mental institutions (not happening), 571 miles of newly built border wall in his first administration (off by over 100, even counting repairs to existing walls), Nancy Pelosi rejecting his offer of  National Guard troops on January 6 (didn't happen), the House's J6 select committee destroying evidence (it didn't), and the 2020 election being "rigged" (it wasn't).

He even added some new ones -- claiming "record inflation" during the Biden Administration (nope, the record -- 23.7% -- was set on Trump's own watch in 2020); asserting his opponents tried to rig the election he just won (I guess to overcome the narrowness of his win, a sort of reprise of his claims in 2016 that he would have won the popular vote against Hillary if illegals had not cast ballots); and charging that China runs the Panama Canal (it doesn't, but Trump wants it "back" and appears ready to take it back, by force if necessary).

So that was our yesterday.

One King had a dream.

The other returned as a nightmare.