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martin luther king jr
Trump Uses King’s Legacy as a Distraction at Best and a Target at Worst
When Trump released the MLK FBI files, privacy concerns and an ideological assault on King’s memory had little meaning for Trump as he tried to escape his Epstein crisis by any means necessary.
Aug 18, 2025
On January 20, Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office with—at least in his mind—an aura of invincibility. A fully compliant Congress was controlled by Republicans who were, in turn, controlled by him. Conservative justices, three of whom he had appointed, dominated the Supreme Court. The defeated opposition, the Democratic Party, seemed distinctly befuddled and weak.
Trump then smashed and bullied his way through his first 100 days, ruling via dictator-like decrees—executive orders—and carrying out retribution at every turn. Democracy’s redlines were crossed daily, and his MAGA base remained passionately loyal even as the rest of the nation soured watching him do little to make the country better.
However, his “realignment” was never faintly as broad or as solid as he pretended it was. For example, while he made gains with Black voters in the 2024 election, rising from 8% in 2020 to 15%, the last six months have seen a dramatic change in that support. In January 2025, according to a YouGov poll, Black Americans’ disapproval of Trump was at about 69%. By June, it had risen to about 85%. Through it all, however, his support among Republicans continued to hover between 88% and 95%.
Then, of course, came the Jeffrey Epstein crisis. Trump himself seeded conspiracies surrounding the dead pedophile and his accomplices at rallies and in social media postings. He minimized his 20-year friendship with both Epstein and his girlfriend (and convicted child trafficker) Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for her part in their horrific crimes. Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel each claimed at some point to have evidence that would expose a “deep-state” cover-up in the case, while bizarre stories of global pedophile rings led by Democrats animated MAGA as much as Trump’s “build the wall” dreams.
The MAGA faithful were waiting for the deliverable. Trump, however, found himself trapped, knowing that he’s part of whatever materials exist and that he will not look good (whether he did anything illegal or not) if the Epstein files are actually released. His constantly changing excuses have spread dissent among his own worshipers and led a panicked Trump to throw out any shiny objects he could think of to change the subject.
Pay Attention to the Shiny Object Over There
On July 21, as part of his Epstein Distraction Campaign, Trump released more than 230,000 pages of FBI and government files related to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968. The more than 6,000 files include FBI documents related to the killing, most of which are not new, according to experts who have reviewed them. They do not, however, include the agency’s nefarious wiretaps of King that are scheduled for release in 2027. There was, of course, neither rhyme nor reason to Trump’s dispersal of those files at that moment.
The president’s claim was that he was keeping a promise he had made when he returned to the White House in January. Within a few days of being in office, on January 23, Trump issued Executive Order 14176 with instructions for the declassification and release of files related to the assassinations of King, John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy. It was a feint at transparency meant to feed the anti-federalist conspiracists in his base. For decades, a cadre of Americans has believed that there was a government-backed cover-up of those killings. In the modern era, the “deep-state” adherents of MAGA world and online extremists have indeed kept those fantasies circulating.
Martin Luther King III and Bernice King, the surviving King children, were advised of the release and opposed it. They then issued a statement that read in part, “While we support transparency and historical accountability, we object to any attacks on our father’s legacy or attempts to weaponize it to spread falsehoods. We strongly condemn any attempts to misuse these documents in ways intended to undermine our father’s legacy and the significant achievements of the movement.” Bernice would later post on social media, “Now, do the Epstein files,” making it clear that she was not fooled by Trump’s flaccid bait-and-switch game. Of course, privacy concerns and an ideological assault on their father and his legacy have little meaning for Trump as he tries to escape his Epstein crisis by any means necessary.
The president’s efforts to roll back the 20th century and overthrow everything King stood for have helped him forge allies with some of the most extreme elements in the nation.
What the King family, scholars, and followers of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy are legitimately worried about is that the content of those files may serve to reenergize the long and shameful history of the FBI’s attacks on the late civil rights leader. Under the dictatorial rule of then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the agency surveilled, wiretapped, and harassed King and other Black leaders relentlessly during his lifetime.
It was the FBI that tried to convince King to commit suicide. It was the FBI that sent information to news outlets accusing King of being controlled by communists. It was the FBI that fostered conflicts and divisions both among Black activists and between the civil rights Movement and white allies. Accusations of womanizing were issued to newspapers to embarrass and discredit King. The purpose, as clear as a bell, was to destroy him, his leadership, and the movement.
More broadly, the FBI’s Cointelpro (counter-intelligence program), which officially lasted from 1956 to 1971, sought to annihilate movements for justice, fairness, democracy, peace, and inclusion in the 1950s and beyond. Lives were ruined and campaigns suffered setbacks for exercising legitimate and constitutionally protected free speech and protest rights. Despite the exposure of its many, many crimes, for the most part, neither the FBI nor Hoover were held accountable for what they had done. Hoover, in fact, died of a heart attack while still director in May 1972.
Investigations by scholars and even Congress have since uncovered a wide range of illegal and unethical behavior by the federal government as it sought to disrupt and destroy the civil rights and other movements of the period. It would be decades, however, before the FBI itself offered anything close to an apology, let alone any effort to repair the carnage it had wrought.
When James Comey assumed the role of FBI director in 2013, he made a bit of a mea culpa. In his inaugural speech, he called the agency’s treatment of King “abuse and overreach,” an appropriate (if exceedingly mild) acknowledgement and rebuke of its deplorable and criminal conduct toward him and other racial and social justice activists. And as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted in “Unleashed and Unaccountable, The FBI’s Unchecked Abuse of Authority,” a report released at that time, the agency’s violations of rights were then still continuing, particularly against people of color, immigrants, and Muslims.
The current FBI director, Trump loyalist, and true believer Kash Patel is seen as anything but a friend of civil rights and civil liberties. Besides being unqualified for the job, having never served in a serious senior law enforcement position, he’s an election denier and an advocate of Trump’s desire for retribution against his perceived enemies. Prior to becoming FBI director, he had published his own enemies list. His nomination as director was denounced by the ACLU, the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and many other civil rights and civil liberties organizations.
With Trump’s blessing (essentially orders), Patel began purging the FBI of agents and investigators who had worked successfully on cases involving the pro-Trump January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and others simply seen as not sufficiently MAGA or supplicant enough to the president. His job is to crush the bureau as part of a Trumpian revenge fantasy, while weaponizing its authority for political purposes. If there is information in the released King documents that might embarrass the FBI, so be it. But there is little doubt that the Epstein files, which could actually put Trump in a compromised position, even though his name has reportedly been redacted in them, will never see the light of day.
Whatever may or may not be in the files Trump did release, it’s a stretch to believe that his concern in releasing them had anything to do with truth and openness regarding what happened to King or the Kennedys, rather than a distraction from his own situation. In fact, Trump has failed to criticize in any fashion the MAGA supporters who have been on an anti-King rampage in recent years. His feral sense of survival tells him that King is too much of an icon to go directly after him, while quoting him on occasion is a way, however superficial, of trying to win more Black support.
King Under Far-Right Attack
It’s been quite a different matter for other significant MAGA figures. In such an anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), anti-woke era, Trump-loving far-right activists have, in fact, repeatedly and viciously attacked King. Typically, for instance, in December 2023, Charlie Kirk, founder of the far-right Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and frequently seen with Trump, insisted that King’s reputation was overblown and that he was “awful” and “not a good person.” In particular, he called the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (CRA), the result of one of King’s most significant and defining campaigns and a giant step forward for the nation, a “huge mistake.” In his view, the CRA established a “permanent DEI-type bureaucracy,” a perspective that perfectly fits Trump’s ongoing blitzkrieg against all the accomplishments of the civil rights and racial justice movements.
Nor is Kirk faintly alone. Other TPUSA associates and allies have joined his crusade. Far-right activist Blake Neff, an associate of Kirk, typically has accused King of not really being a “peaceful activist,” but actually advocating for an activism that became “a very violent thing.” Naturally, Neff provided no evidence to back up such an assertion.
Yet another TPUSA spokesperson, Andrew Kolvet, has also fed such attacks. In an email, for instance, he wrote: “A core part of this fake history of America is the elevation of MLK into a saint, whose entire being is beyond reproach and above question. This sanctified version of MLK strips away his actual views and ignores his actual actions.”
In the past, like many conservatives, including Trump, they also sometimes misappropriated King’s words to attempt to deradicalize him. Kirk used to refer to him as a “hero” and the TPUSA website sold a T-shirt with King’s name and stickers that had King saying, “Let freedom ring.” But that was yesteryear.
Some Black MAGA personalities pushed back against Kirk, including Reverend Darrell Scott, who called him “an a-hole” and “a racist.” Scott was a high-profile Black advocate for Trump, especially during his first term, and remains loyal to him. He charged that Kirk wants to bring “white superiority attitudes” back to the Republican Party. Scott, of course, has long ignored or excused Trump’s attitude of “white superiority.”
Conservative media personality Armstrong Williams, who has kept a bit of distance from Trump, also criticized Kirk. He suggested he do more reading on US and Black history.
However, Black far-right condemnation was anything but universal. Chicago-based MAGA promoter Bishop Aubrey Shines and TPUSA Director of Black Outreach Pierre Wilson both went on Kirk’s podcast defending his attacks on King, insisting Kirk was not a racist, and adding their own venom to the mix. Wilson, for instance, stated, “Maybe just maybe he’s not the hero that everyone said he is.”
The Anti-King Trump
In Trump’s second term, propelled by his all-in, full-spectrum anti-DEI agenda, there’s no longer any need for his followers to pretend there’s anything about Martin Luther King Jr., however distorted, that needs to be praised. The president’s efforts to roll back the 20th century and overthrow everything King stood for have helped him forge allies with some of the most extreme elements in the nation. It’s always been the case for Trump that any positive mention of King was performative and meaningless. What matters now, however, are the actual policies and laws that Trump has promulgated, which are meant to wipe a King-like view of this country from the face of the Earth.
Although Trump was a teenager during King’s last years, there is no record of his participation in or concern for the civil rights and racial justice issues of that era. In fact, the only policy relationship to Blacks that he had then lay in the way he and his father violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which King had championed in his last days and which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on April 10, 1968, only six days after King was murdered.
In 1973, Donald Trump first broke into the news in New York and nationally when Trump properties in that city were sued by the Department of Justice for refusing to rent to African Americans. After a years-long court fight, a consent decree was signed in which Donald and his father, Fred Trump, admitted no guilt but were forced to change their rental practices. However, despite their denials, a later New York Times investigation “uncovered a long history of racial bias at his family’s properties, in New York and beyond.”
Donald Trump would, of course, love for the debate to shift to what the FBI—“the deep state”—did to King, and to see liberals and conservatives alike spin off on that tangent and forget about his Epstein troubles.
In our time, Trump’s attacks on civil rights and voting rights belie any rhetoric he may spew on King’s birthday or other occasions. In his first term, and with far less restraint the second time around, Trump has, in fact, sought to roll back decades of achievements in the areas of racial and social justice and democracy that King and so many others fought and died for. He’s taken a wrecking ball to institutions, programs, and policies throughout the federal government that were put in place to advance the full inclusion of people of color, women, the disabled, and the LGBTQ community. The attack on DEI is more broadly an effort to erase the hard-won gains that have evolved in the years from the passage of the post-Civil War 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to President Johnson’s Great Society to the Black Lives Matter uprisings, while establishing an unchallengeable fascist state and authoritarian presidency.
The pushback against the expansion of rights from Ronald Reagan’s presidency to the Trumpian moment confronted laws that were passed, policies put in place, agencies that were established, and sometimes weak but stable democratic structures that limited the harm that could be done—until, that is, the Trump and MAGA movement. After only six months in office the second time around, driven by numerous unlawful decrees, nearly every department and agency in the federal government has eliminated its civil rights enforcement division. Discrimination cases involving people of color have been dismissed. Laws to fight bigotry continue to go unenforced. As Nikole Hannah Jones wrote in the New York Times, the administration is sending “a powerful message to American institutions that discrimination will not be punished.”
Donald Trump would, of course, love for the debate to shift to what the FBI—“the deep state”—did to King, and to see liberals and conservatives alike spin off on that tangent and forget about his Epstein troubles, his failing and flailing tariff war, and the growing unpopularity of his Big Ugly Budget and his recission proposal. A significant part of his base, which he consciously cultivated to a cult-like fidelity, is righteously angered and demanding answers. His deflections when caught in a lie or a scandal have long worked to move past the immediate crisis, but maybe, just maybe, not this time.
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Amid Calls for Epstein Files, Trump Admin Releases 230,000 MLK Documents
One critic called the move "a desperate attempt to distract from the Trump administration's decision to block the release of the Epstein files."
Jul 21, 2025
As U.S. President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans stonewall efforts to keep the full files on deceased financier and convicted child sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein under wraps, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Monday released a long-anticipated massive trove of documents related to the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., despite opposition from his family.
"Today, after nearly 60 years of questions surrounding the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we are releasing 230,000 MLK assassination files, available now at https://archives.gov/mlk," Gabbard said on the social media site X. "The documents include details about the FBI's investigation into the assassination of MLK, discussion of potential leads, internal FBI memos detailing the progress of the case, information about James Earl Ray's former cellmate who stated he discussed with Ray an alleged assassination plot, and more."
"Thanks to President Donald Trump's leadership, Executive Order 14176 resulted in three, unprecedented interagency efforts to identify, digitize, declassify, and release files related to the federal government's investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. King," Gabbard added.
However, many of the MLK documents remain heavily redacted.
Responding to the MLK files' publication, the King family said in a statement: "As the children of Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, his tragic death has been an intensely personal grief—a devastating loss for his wife, children, and the granddaughter he never met—an absence our family has endured for over 57 years. We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family's continuing grief."
Statement from the King Family on the Release of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Assassination Files:
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— Martin Luther King III (@officialmlk3.bsky.social) July 21, 2025 at 1:00 PM
The King family reiterated their belief that "someone other than James Earl Ray was the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame."
"As we review these newly released files, we will assess whether they offer additional insights beyond the findings our family has already accepted," their statement said.
As his relatives noted, the FBI infamously surveilled King—America's most hated man, according to a 1968 Harris poll that showed the civil rights icon with a 75% negative approval rating—under the notorious COINTELPRO program, especially after his civil rights activism evolved into staunch critiques of U.S. militarism during the escalating Vietnam War and capitalism-driven economic inequality.
Then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy authorized the wiretapping of King's phone, with the head agent in charge of COINTELPRO, William Sullivan, warning that "we must mark [King]... as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation." This, just before King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for helping to lead the struggle against Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement.
The FBI systematically bugged King's home and hotel rooms, mailed an anonymous letter urging him to kill himself, and even sent a tape of what it claimed was King having one of his numerous alleged affairs to his wife. When King criticized the FBI for ignoring the heinous and often murderous crimes of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists who were still lynching Black people with alarming regularity and impunity, an infuriated Hoover publicly called him the "most notorious liar" in America.
People from across the political spectrum took to social media to slam the MLK document dump as "a desperate attempt to distract from the Trump administration's decision to block the release of the Epstein files (despite earlier promises)," as the X account Republicans Against Trump portrayed the move.
Prominent attorney and Democratic strategist Aaron Parnas wrote on the social media site Bluesky, "Whether through releasing the MLK files or trying to prosecute President [Barack] Obama, Donald Trump is flooding the zone with information to distract you from the Epstein files."
Bernice King—MLK's granddaughter and CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change—wrote on X: "Now, do the Epstein files."
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We Must Resist Trump’s Attack on DEI
Trump is, in effect, attempting with the stroke of a pen to undo over 60 years of hard-won progress in overcoming racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.
Jan 25, 2025
This year, the presidential inauguration took place on the federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. President Donald Trump fully exploited the opportunity, hijacking King’s memory to advance his agenda. In his inaugural address, Trump took immediate aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. The bigotry embedded in Trump’s plans to “Make America Great Again” is stark—purging people of color and LGBTQIA people, not only from employment in the federal government, but from public life. But people have fought for too long, and too many have died, in the fight for equality.
“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” refers to a system of policies and practices that promote fair treatment, full participation, and full access to employment and opportunities for all, especially for people from historically marginalized communities. Trump is, in effect, attempting with the stroke of a pen to undo over 60 years of hard-won progress in overcoming racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.
“Today is Martin Luther King Day,” Trump said in his inaugural speech in the Capitol Rotunda, one of the only factually accurate statements he made. He went on, “In his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.”
Moments later, though, he pledged,
“This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.”
Following the speech, Trump issued a flurry of executive orders. Within hours, a form letter was emailed to federal departments, ordering the suspension, by end of day Wednesday, of any staff working on DEI initiatives, and giving remaining staff 10 days to report any ongoing “disguised” DEI activity, ie, to rat out colleagues.
While Trump spoke at his inauguration, a different gathering was taking place just a few blocks from the White House. Hundreds packed into the historic Metropolitan AME Church, the storied Black church that abolitionist Frederick Douglass attended, and where his funeral took place. In 2005, after Rosa Parks lay in state in the Capitol, her casket was moved to Metropolitan AME, for a memorial service.
Civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton was speaking at the same moment as Trump. Hearing that Trump had invoked King’s name in his speech, Sharpton responded:
Donald Trump just said that he is going to end DEI this week, he’s gonna put out his executive orders. You have all these corporations that are saying they’re gonna back off DEI. Why do we have DEI? We have DEI because you denied us diversity, you denied us equity, you denied us inclusion. DEI was a remedy to the racial institutional bigotry practiced in academia and in these corporations. Now you want to put us back in the back of the bus? We’re going to do the Dr. King/Rosa Parks on you. We will call you out one by one, and we will shut you down.
Later on King Day, Trump held a rally where he signed the first stack of executive orders, including a blanket rescission of many of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders, including at least 15 that advanced diversity, equity, and inclusion. Later, Trump signed a much broader order calling for the termination of all “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government,” and to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions.”
The “A” in DEIA stands for “accessible,” thus extending Trump’s war on fellow citizens to include the disabled.
Sharpton and other speakers invoked not only Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, but the whole sweep of history, from the first arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619, to Frederick Douglass, to the role of freed slaves fighting in the Civil War, through the protests in 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd.
Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, convened an emergency “Demand Diversity” roundtable in Washington D.C. on Wednesday. While Trump was inaugurated on King Day, Morial pointed out that Trump is no king:
These executive orders are unlawful, they are unconstitutional, and they seek to do what we always suspected. This is not a monarchy. You can’t rule by decree or edict. This is a constitutional democracy… we have to remember this as we go into this very important battle.
Participants in the roundtable, representing over 20 national civil rights and human rights organizations, form the core of a coalition committed to fighting Trump’s agenda. The coalition is guided and inspired by the memory and the lessons of Martin Luther King Jr. Organize, boycott, resist. These are the struggles, ultimately, that history will remember as great.
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