MLK Day Meets MAGA Day: The Civil Rights Movement’s Worst Plot Twist

If you ever needed a visual representation of America’s gleeful commitment to historical amnesia, look no further than Donald J. Trump—birther-in-chief, professional race-baiter and lifelong bigot—being sworn in as the nation’s 47th President on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

You couldn’t script a more grotesque spectacle if you tried.

It’s like throwing a birthday party for Malcolm X at a Cracker Barrel. Hosting a police appreciation gala in honor of Fred Hampton. Giving Strom Thurmond the keynote at a Shirley Chisholm tribute. Holding a Jeff Bezos-sponsored union-busting workshop to honor A. Philip Randolph. Unveiling a statue of Ronald Reagan at the site of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Erecting a Confederate monument in honor of Ida B. Wells and celebrating Juneteenth with a Marjorie Taylor Greene cookout.

It’s such a tacky slap-in-the-face absurdity that would make a wax figure of Frederick Douglass side-eye in disgust.

MORE: Two Americas, One Day: The Truth We Must Speak Now

Lest we forget, Trump is the man who rode birtherism to the White House; who was sued by the Justice Department for racist housing discrimination; took out a full-page ad calling for the execution of the exonerated Central Park Five; who called white supremacists “very fine people;” “who told four Black congresswomen to “go back” to where they came from despite all being U.S. citizens.

He launched his 2016 presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants, “rapists” and criminals, and refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke. His administration implemented a ban targeting travelers from predominantly Muslim countries. He referred to African nations as “shithole countries” and claimed that Haitian immigrants “have AIDS” while suggesting they eat pet cats and dogs. And he’s planning to launch the largest mass deportation operation in modern U.S. history, vowing to round up millions of undocumented immigrants with a militarized force that sounds less like border enforcement and more like a dystopian purge. So, in case there was any lingering doubt, his entire political brand is just one long, rage-fueled sequel to Birth of a Nation.

Nothing says “honoring Dr. King”—who was dedicated to justice, equality, and racial harmony—like swearing in a man whose civil rights record makes a burning cross look subtle. If irony were any thicker, you could carve it with a chainsaw and serve it at a state dinner.

But this isn’t just irony, y’all.

It’s a necrophilic wet dream for the legions of politicians, pundits and keyboard warriors who have spent decades cherry-picking, distorting and sanitizing King’s radical legacy for their own shallow and self-serving agendas.

In Alabama and Mississippi, the absurdity has reached new heights as these states once again prove they have the range—to simultaneously celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert E. Lee. They have the sheer audacity to celebrate the racist white man who fought to keep Black people in chains alongside the man who died trying to break those chains. Nothing screams “UNITY” like forcing civil rights and white supremacy into a joint celebration.

While much of the country spends MLK Day engaging in acts of service and reflection, these states are busy perfecting the art of historical gaslighting and ensuring that white nostalgia and Black liberation get equal billing. And as if that weren’t enough, this year they get to top it all off with the inauguration of a president who stands in direct opposition to everything King fought for. This isn’t surprising, though. If America loves one thing, it’s the shameless performance of democracy while clinging to the very systems that undermine it.

What we are witnessing play out isn’t an aberration. This is America, and America loves a good revisionist history lesson, especially when it allows white folks to co-opt a legacy they once despised.

Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is the living, breathing antithesis of everything MLK stood for. King fought against economic exploitation—Trump built his empire on it, stiffing workers, scamming students at Trump University and using bankruptcy laws as a personal piggy bank.

King fought for the dignity of the poor—Trump handed billions to the rich while gutting healthcare, food assistance and housing protections. And he’s just getting started.

He’s already laying the groundwork for even bigger tax cuts for billionaires while slashing social programs, ensuring that struggling families get even less while the ultra-wealthy build more yachts. He’s cozying up to tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, promising deregulation that will let them hoard more wealth, exploit workers and treat the economy like their own personal Monopoly board. Meanwhile, his billionaire buddies are brainstorming new ways to crush unions, gut labor protections and turn public services into profit machines—because nothing says populism like making sure America’s richest men get richer while everyday people are left to fight over the crumbs.

King fought against militarism—Trump embraced war hawks, escalated drone strikes and openly fantasized about war crimes. And he’s not done yet.

He’s ramping up his tough-guy act on China, rattling sabers about trade wars while hinting at more aggressive military posturing in the Pacific. His foreign policy playbook is a greatest-hits album of American interventionism—saber-rattling with Iran, pledging even more blank-check support for right-wing regimes and doubling down on the idea that diplomacy is for suckers. He’s already talked about expanding military budgets while gutting diplomacy, ensuring that weapons manufacturers and defense contractors keep their pockets fat while the world edges closer to another avoidable catastrophe. And if history has taught us anything, it’s that Trump never met a conflict he couldn’t escalate, a dictator he wouldn’t praise, or a chance to flex his authoritarian instincts on the global stage.

King fought for voting rights—Trump’s Supreme Court picks helped gut the Voting Rights Act, paving the way for rampant voter suppression. And now, with Project 2025 lurking in the background like a right-wing fever dream, the attacks on democracy are only getting more ambitious.

While Trump publicly claimed he had no idea what Project 2025 is (as if plausible deniability has ever been his strong suit), the agenda reads like a blueprint for voter suppression on steroids—weaponizing the Department of Justice to go after election officials, pushing for aggressive voter fraud prosecutions, and reviving efforts to intimidate communities of color with a census citizenship question designed to undercount them. It’s a full-scale assault on voting rights disguised as “election integrity.” Now that he’s back in office, Trump’s allies will be more than happy to execute the plan while he plays dumb.

Martin Luther King Jr. championed the inherent dignity and rights of all individuals, advocating for a society where people are judged by their character rather than their origin. He envisioned an inclusive America that welcomes immigrants, recognizing their contributions to the nation’s fabric. In stark contrast, Donald Trump’s immigration policies, including mass deportations, travel bans targeting specific countries and militarized border enforcement, embody the very exclusion and discrimination that King dedicated his life to dismantling. While King sought to build bridges of understanding and unity, Trump’s approach erects barriers, both literal and figurative, undermining the progress toward equality and justice that King tirelessly pursued.

And yet on Monday, Trump’s slack-jawed devotees, Confederate cosplayers and assorted bootlickers waved their little flags and pretended this is democracy in action. The same people who cheered when King was murdered will now trot out their favorite, gutted-to-hell MLK quotes about “judging people by the content of their character.” They will preach about unity, as if King didn’t spend his final years dismantling America’s fantasy of racial harmony and articulated his fears about integrating Black people into “a burning house.”

This is the cycle.

America kills its revolutionaries, then drags their corpses into the public square to repackage them into something digestible. MLK had a dream and America answered with a bullet to the head. And now, this country serves up his sanitized image to legitimize ongoing political violence. Resistance is turned into a Hallmark holiday. The radical fire of his movement is smothered beneath a mountain of platitudes, McDonald’s commercials, memes and empty congressional resolutions. And now, as Black communities across the country gather to honor King’s real legacy—through acts of service, activism and remembrance—Trump refused to place his stubby, ketchup-stained hand on a Bible to swear to uphold a Constitution he barely comprehends.

But is this contradiction or just the natural order of things?

If anything, Trump’s inauguration on MLK Day is the most honest depiction of America’s true nature. This is a country that swears by democracy but was built on the backs of stolen people, stolen land and stolen labor. A country that claims to revere King but has spent every decade since his murder dismantling everything he fought for.

Trump isn’t an outlier. He’s the inevitable manifestation of this nation’s moral rot. He is the Confederate flag in a cheap suit, the Jim Crow South with a gold-plated toilet. The white rage he represents has always been lurking beneath the surface, and now it gets to dance, unchecked, on the very day meant to commemorate one of its most powerful opponents and architects of racial justice.

So let them have their grotesque inauguration. The whole lot of them who showed up at the U.S. Capitol and exposed themselves as collaborators. Let them bask in their historical perversion. Because while they desecrate King’s memory with empty rhetoric and hypocritical sermons, the real work of his movement continues. It won’t happen in the marble halls of Washington, but in the grassroots, in the streets, in the hearts of people who refuse to let his dream be reduced to a meaningless soundbite.

History will remember Trump, his political allies and those hordes of MAGA not as patriots, but as the smug architects of America’s ongoing moral bankruptcy. And when the dust settles, when their grand delusion collapses under the weight of its own hypocrisy, the people who actually believe in justice will still be here—organizing, resisting, and making sure that no amount of necrophilic whitewashing will ever scrub away the truth.

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