MLK's Dream Is Trump's Nightmare

The juxtaposition is hard to ignore: President-elect Donald Trump, who launched his political career by questioning — without evidence — the citizenship of our country’s first Black president, will take his second oath of office on the day we remember and honor Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., this country’s greatest champion for civil and human rights. Though I hope and pray Trump’s second term will follow the moral vision we honor every year on King’s birthday, I fear the dream King cast for America is much more akin to Trump’s nightmare.

And what, exactly, was King’s dream? While we don’t need to agree with everything that King said or stood for in order to honor him, I do think we need to be more honest about the dream he sought for our country, especially if we hope to realize that dream. Despite the ubiquity of the speech he delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, we rarely appreciate the depth and breadth of King’s vision — a vision that some have co-opted to advance agendas counter to King’s vision. Jonathan Eig notes this in his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, King: A Life. “We’ve heard the recording of ‘I Have a Dream’ so many times we don’t really hear it anymore,” he writes, “we no longer register its cry for America to recognize the ‘unspeakable horrors of police brutality’ or its petition for economic reparations. We don’t appreciate that King was making demands, not wishes.”

In an often-overlooked part of that famous speech, King uses an extended banking metaphor: He asserts the people who signed the Constitution had signed “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir” to “unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But while African Americans had been told their check had bounced, “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt,” King counters. As the speech develops, King builds a vision of country that offers expanded opportunity for everyone — a vision that also requires seeking restitution for those who have long been shut out.

I see this as the most important theme throughout all King’s speeches: a moral vision for the United States in which everyone, regardless of their race, sex, religion, or creed, is equally valued and has the opportunity to thrive. This is the essence of the Beloved Community, the vision that unifies the work of many civil rights leaders, including King. Building on that legacy, I’ve defined the Beloved Community as a society in which neither punishment nor privilege is tied to any form of human hierarchy and our growing diversity is embraced as a strength, not a threat. This vision, which refuses to leave anyone out, is transformative. In 1956, after winning a major victory in the Montgomery Bus boycott, King explained the ultimate aim of the Civil Rights Movement, saying: “…the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends.”

Though difficult to put into practice, King refused to succumb to hate or violence against his oppressor even as he was courageous in his truth-telling and nonviolent protest against injustice. I share his belief, anchored in my faith, that every heart and mind can be changed; there can be no “us versus them” — we must all cocreate a radically more inclusive and just world. 

In the last years of his life, King’s vision sharpened around the importance of dismantling “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism,” as he put it in his famous speech at Riverside Church. King explained how the racism, poverty, and war were (and are) inseparable and mutually reinforcing in the United States, such that tackling these systems holistically is required. For example, then as now, the United States’ gigantic military budget makes it more difficult to secure adequate government funding for programs of social uplift, including expansions to affordable health care, the child tax credit, and housing assistance. King’s economic vision was also quite specific; buried in the annals of Civil Rights Movement history are documents such as the Freedom Budget in which King collaborated with Bayard Rustin to propose “a practical, step-by-step plan for wiping out poverty in America,” which promised jobs, living wages, and an adequate income for those who can’t work.

The contrast between King’s dream and the vision of America Donald Trump has cast could not be starker.

Throughout his political career, Trump has re-popularized former President Reagan’s slogan of “Make America Great Again” in ways designed to stoke racial grievance around economic insecurity and the changing demographics of this nation. Where King saw the greatness of our nation as its constitutional promise of equality for all, Trump’s vision of American greatness promises great privilege for some — while often casting immigrants and many minorities as scapegoats for all that detracts from American greatness. Trump began his first presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” who were “bringing crime” and “bringing drugs” into the country. Since then, he has continued to promote a vision that praises and promises protection and favor to far-Right Christians, billionaires, “patriots,” and his political allies while labeling others — such as immigrants, transgender people, Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists, and his political opponent — as threats.

And it’s not just rhetoric: The policies Trump supports have often upheld this vision of inequality and injustice for people of color and other marginalized groups including new restrictions on voting rights, decreased LGBTQ protections, a revived Muslim ban, continued attacks on reproductive rights, and cruel deportation policies that separated families. Trump has also supercharged efforts to dismantle affirmative action, end racial equity programs in the government and private sector, and prevent many of the ugly truths from our racialized history from being taught. In King’s vision, everyone is created equal and even enemies are worthy of agape love; in Trump’s vision, there are promises of revenge and spreading falsehoods about perceived enemies. 

Trump’s economic priorities also so often directly counter what King fought for. Despite styling himself as a champion of the working class, Trump has consistently opposed efforts to pay a living wage, including within his own companies. His administration questioned whether people truly needed the aid they received and proposed draconian cuts to social programs such as SNAP and WIC that provide a lifeline of support to struggling Americans. The idea of a basic level of income for those who are unable to work seems anathema to Trump’s worldview and priorities, which prioritize tax cuts that disproportionately benefitted the wealthy and corporations and falsely castigate social programs as “socialism.” 

Trump has so often appealed to many of our country’s worst demons — chief among them the very same triplets of racism, excessive materialism, and militarism that King worked to dismantle. Trump also both exploits and amplifies for his own benefit the pernicious feelings of grievance and victimization that are all so prevalent among his many of his ardent supporters. In contrast, King constantly sought to appeal to our better angels, calling us to live up to the promises and ideals of our founding documents and the timeless moral teachings of his Christian faith such as agape love, altruism, and service. “You are what you are because of somebody else,” King said. “You are what you are because of the grace of the Almighty God. He who seeks to find his ego will lose it. But he who loses his ego in some great cause, some great purpose, some great ideal, some great loyalty...he who discovers that he stands where he stands because of the grace of God, finds himself.”

Since our nation’s inception we have seen a tug of war take place between very different moral visions. These visions matter because they often undergird our politics and communicate who we are and who we want to become. On this day when both King and Trump will be in the limelight, along with their competing visions, I hope that each of us — and our nation as a whole — choose King’s dream and seeks to make it reality.