One thing Trump and King have in common is that both went into the family business. Trump was born to wealth and inherited his father’s real estate empire, even though he claims to be a self-made billionaire, despite many business failures and bankruptcies. King was the son of a prominent Atlanta minister. Despite growing up in a solidly middle-class family, King saw the widespread human suffering caused by the Depression, particularly in the black community. In 1950, while in graduate school, he wrote an essay describing the "anticapitalistic feelings" he experienced as a youngster as a result of seeing unemployed people standing in breadlines. There is little evidence that Trump has ever had any sympathetic feelings about the nation’s downtrodden.
King reluctantly entered the public stage as the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, at the age of 26. He began his activism as a crusader against racial segregation, but the struggle for civil rights radicalized him into a fighter for broader economic and social justice and peace.
On almost every imaginable issue, King and Trump are polar opposites.
King warned about the "gulf between the haves and the have-nots." He challenged America’s class system, calling for a "radical redistribution of economic and political power." He said that America needed a "better distribution of wealth for all God’s children." He would certainly be appalled that the richest 0.1% of the population now holds nearly six times as much total wealth as the bottom half or that the ratio of CEO to worker pay has increased from 21-to-1 in 1965 to 366-to-1 today.
When King launched a civil rights campaign in Chicago in 1965, he was shocked by the hatred and violence expressed by whites as he and his followers marched through the streets of segregated neighborhoods in Chicago and its suburbs. He saw that the problem in Chicago's ghettos was not legal segregation but "economic exploitation"—slum housing, overpriced food and low-wage jobs—"because someone profits from its existence."
In 1966 King confided to his staff: "You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.”
Trump has spent his entire life seeking money and power. In his first term as President, he passed tax cuts for the super-rich and other policies that exacerbate the wealth divide. For his second term, his top appointments and advisors are disproportionately corporate executives and billionaires like Elon Musk, who are paying for his inauguration events. They are counting on Trump to repeal or weaken regulations that protect consumers, workers, and the environment, to further reduce taxes on wealthy Americans, and to dismantle much of the social safety net for the nation’s most vulnerable, although they are divided on whether his plans to deport immigrants and impose tariffs will help or hinder their corporate bottom lines. For sure, they are pleased to have a president who won’t be walking picket lines with striking workers or making it easier to join unions.
King was a close ally of unions and was committed to building bridges between the labor and civil rights movements. Unions were a key sponsor of the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. One of the march’s key demands was an increase in the federal minimum wage from $1.15 to $2 an hour. In today’s terms, that would mean a boost from $11.82 to $20.56 an hour.
Invited to address the AFL-CIO's annual convention in 1961, King observed, "Our needs are identical with labor's needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children, and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor's demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.”
He continued: "The labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who today attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them." Speaking to a meeting of Teamsters union shop stewards in 1967, King said, "Negroes are not the only poor in the nation. There are nearly twice as many white poor as Negro, and therefore the struggle against poverty is not involved solely with color or racial discrimination but with elementary economic justice." He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers' strike.
Trump has consistently been anti-union. He has made increasing the power of corporations over working people his top priority. During his first term, he appointed Eugene Scalia, a union-busting corporate lawyer, as Secretary of Labor. He packed the federal courts with anti-labor judges and stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union appointees who sided with employers in contract disputes and supported companies who delayed and stalled union elections, and misclassified workers to take away their freedom to join a union, and silence workers. Trump made it easier for employers to fire or penalize workers who speak up for better pay and working conditions or exercise the right to strike. Trump pledged to veto the Protect the Right to Organize Act, historic proposals meant to reverse decades of legislation meant to crush unions. Trump restricted overtime pay, opposed wage increases, and gutted health and safety protections. He reduced the number of OSHA inspectors so that there were fewer than at any time in history, and weakened penalties for companies that fail to report violations. He said he would veto legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, which has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009. Trump failed to secure enough Personal Protective Equipment for essential workers during the COVID-19 crisis and weakened protections for workers concerned about working in unsafe environments. During a live conversation on X with Elon Musk on August 12, Trump said striking workers should be fired.
In 1966, King said, "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane." During his first term, Trump sought to repeal Obamacare, but was thwarted by Senate John McCain’s vote against repeal. He has never proposed a serious alternative to Obamacare. During a debate with Kamala Harris in September, when asked whether he had a replacement plan, he said he had the “concepts of a plan.” Trump supports an ongoing lawsuit that would eliminate protections that ensure that health insurers can't discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. Trump has threatened to veto legislation to reduce prescription drug costs. In his first term, he proposed significant budget cuts for Medicare.
King spent his life fighting against discrimination and bigotry of all kinds. He was proud of his role in getting Congress to pass, and President Lyndon Johnson to sign, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He spoke out loudly and often against landlords, banks, and developers who discriminated against Blacks and other minority groups.
King pushed for passage of the Fair Housing Act to ban discrimination in housing. He didn’t live to see the fruits of his efforts, but Johnson utilized the tragedy of King’s assassination to get Congress to pass the law. He signed the bill a week after King's death. King would recognize that the upsurge of white supremacist and neo-fascist violence, catalyzed in part by Trump, are the heirs of racist thugs like Bull Connor, George Wallace, the White Citizens Councils, and the Ku Klux Klan of his day.
As a landlord, Trump has a long history of racial discrimination and frequently found himself afoul of the Fair Housing Act. During the 1960s and 1970s, the New York City Commission on Human Rights and other fair housing organizations and activists documented Trump's routine practice of turning away potential black tenants. One New York state investigation discovered that there were only seven black families living in the 3,700-unit Trump Village complex in Brooklyn. Black families in New York knew that they were unwelcome in Trump's apartment buildings. They were typically told that his buildings had no vacancies, even when they knew that white tenants had no problem finding apartments in the same properties. If a black person applied for an apartment in one of his buildings, Trump would tell his rental agents to "take the application and put it in a drawer and leave it there," Stanely Leibowitz, a Trump employee. recalled in an interview with The New York Times. The Times also reported that "a former Trump superintendent named Thomas Miranda testified that multiple Trump Management employees had instructed him to attach a separate piece of paper with a big letter 'C' on it-for 'colored'-to any application filed by a black apartment-seeker."
In 1973 the U.S. Department of Justice did its own investigation and sued Trump Management for violating the Fair Housing Act for discriminating against blacks. Rather than settle the case, Trump hired Roy Cohn, the high-powered attorney who had served as Senator Joseph McCarthy's redbaiting counsel, to defend him. At Cohn's suggestion, Trump sued the Justice Department, but the assigned judge dismissed the countersuit. Two years later, Trump reluctantly signed a consent decree that required them to desegregate their apartment buildings, including a mandate that Trump Management provide the New York Urban League, a civil-rights group, with a weekly list of all its vacancies. In 1978, however, Justice accused Trump of violating the consent decree. "We believe that an underlying pattern of discrimination continues to exist in the Trump Management organization," a DOJ lawyer wrote to Cohn. But before the DOJ could gather enough evidence to take Trump to court, the original consent decree had expired.
Before and since he entered politics, Trump has consistently fomented hatred and bigotry against Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and immigrants. In 1989, while still an ambitious developer, Trump placed full-page advertisements in four New York City newspapers, including the New York Times, calling for New York State to adopt the death penalty for killers. He made clear that he was voicing this opinion because of the brutal rape and assault of a woman who had been jogging in Central Park, which was pinned on five Black and Latino male teenagers, who were labeled the Central Park Five. The crime triggered a wave of hysteria and led to the wrongful conviction of the five teens, but after serving prison terms, they were found innocent and released after the real perpetrator confessed to the crime. But when asked, Trump has since refused to apologize for fanning the flames of racist stereotypes.
Instead, as both president and as a candidate, he has verbalized, encouraged, enabled, tolerated, winked at, and made excuses for racism and anti-Semitism, most notably when he said that some of the Nazis marching in Charlottesville in 2017 were “good people.” He began his 2016 campaign for president bashing immigrants and has continued to do so ever since, including his rants about immigrants “invading” and “poisoning” America.
King was a forceful critic of American militarism. Although some of his close advisers tried to discourage him from speaking out against the Vietnam war for fear of undermining his fragile relationship with President Johnson, King nevertheless made the break in April 1967, in a bold and prophetic speech at the Riverside Church in New York City, entitled "Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence." King called America the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and linked the struggle for social justice with the struggle against militarism. King argued that Vietnam was stealing precious resources from domestic programs and that the Vietnam War was "an enemy of the poor." In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), King wrote, "The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America." In preparing for the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, just before he died, King called for significant cuts to military spending in order to fund a comprehensive “Freedom Budget” to provide a job guarantee for everyone ready and willing to work, a guaranteed income for those unable to work, and a living wage to lift the working poor out of poverty.
In contrast, Trump is a global expansionist who believes that the U.S. has the right to intervene in countries he disagrees with. He has boasted, without evidence, that as president he strengthened the US military. He was constantly at odds with the Joint Chiefs of Staff who viewed Trump as reckless. He has refused to rule out military action to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal. He’s even said that he might use economic force to force Canada to become the 51st state – a ridiculous idea but one that is in sync with his general outlook about American hegemony. In his first term, he undermined the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty that ensured transparency between the U.S., much of Europe, and Russia, and failed to extend the critical New START Treaty with Russia. His saber-rattling has frightened America’s allies and enemies alike. In 2017, he brought the world terrifyingly close to a nuclear conflict with North Korea. That scenario is even scarier now that he’ll be back in the White House.
Along with other civil rights leaders, King fought hard to dismantle Jim Crow laws that kept blacks from voting. He was a major architect of the campaign to get Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Among other things, that law has helped increase the number of black voters and black elected officials. For example, in 1965 only six blacks served in the U.S. House, with none in the Senate. Starting this year, the number of black House members has jumped to 62 with another seven in the Senate.
Trump has been a consistent foe of voting rights, as have most Republicans in recent decades. Trump’s unsuccessful efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election, based on false accusations of “voter fraud,” led to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump and other Republicans have sought to restrict voting rights by, among other things, requiring photo IDs in order to vote, shrinking the early-voting period, reducing the number of polling places, particularly in Black areas, and ending same-day voter registration and pre-registration for teenagers who will turn 18 by Election Day.
King and Trump’s views about gun violence couldn’t be more different. During the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, King faced constant death threats and feared for his family's life. He owned several guns and allowed armed guards to protect his home. But Bayard Rustin—a pacifist who was one of King's closest advisers—persuaded King to give up his guns and guards and embrace a nonviolent strategy. King's commitment to nonviolence grew stronger as he grew older. After John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963, King wrote: "By our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim, by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing, by allowing all these developments, we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes."
Trump has been a strong foe of efforts to limit the sale and ownership of military-style guns and ammunition. He’s a close ally of the National Rifle Association which was the largest outside spender in his 2016 election campaign. Trump has been keynote speaker at the NRA’s events, and promised to be the NRA’s “loyal friend.” He has said that mass shootings are not “a gun problem” and has told Americans to “get over” school shootings. Last May, speaking to an NRA gathering after the group endorsed him again, Trump said, “We’ve got to get gun owners to vote. I think you’re a rebellious bunch.” He told the gun zealots that the Second Amendment “is very much on the ballot” in last year’s elections.
In 1966, King was one of four recipients of Planned Parenthood's first Margaret Sanger Award, named for the group's founder, a pioneer in educating women about birth control. In accepting the award, King said that "there is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts." He noted how "at the turn of the century, she went into the slums and set up a birth-control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions." King never spoke publicly about his views on abortion, and he was murdered five years before the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, but he was a fervent advocate for universal health care.
Running for president in 2016, Trump promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. As president, he followed through on that pledge, stacking the federal judiciary with staunch abortion opponents, including the three Supreme Court justices who in 2022 guaranteed that the right to abortion would be overturned in their Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling. Trump has bragged that he was the “guy [who] ended Roe v. Wade.”
King fought for a more inclusive democracy. Trump has sought to diminish our democracy and replace it with an oligarchy. Trump has used divide-and-conquer tactics and rhetoric to pull Americans apart and foment hatred and bigotry. King’s approach was to bring Americans together by mobilizing people around common concerns. The only way to effectively challenge Trump’s fascistic agenda, is to follow King’s example of building bridges, not walls. We need to forge coalitions among advocates for workers, immigrants, women’s and LBGTQ equality, students, whites, Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics, the middle class and the most destitute, diplomacy, peace, and human rights.
