This Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Donald Trump will be sworn into office. Working in concert, Trump, the Republican-led House and Senate, and the right-wing Supreme Court threaten to dismantle King’s legacy. If they do, the most vulnerable people in the United States, Black folks in particular, will be attacked. The blueprint for this assault is Project 2025.
The symbolism of Trump being inaugurated on MLK Jr. Day is chilling. Is King’s legacy dead? How can we be observing MLK Day by handing power to a politician who ran a blatantly racist campaign to beat the first Black woman to have run as a major party’s presidential nominee? Has the goal of transforming the United States from a white ethno-state into a multiracial democracy been vanquished? If so, does that leave us plunging headlong into a permanent Republican oligarchy?
King’s life and martyrdom have been split in two. The dominant one is the “I Have a Dream” King. He appears on Apple ads. He is the apostle for nonviolent direct action to end racial segregation.
The lesser known King, the one repressed from official celebration, is the 1968 radical, who was an anti-poverty and antiwar democratic socialist.
We need that legacy of King to build a working class, progressive supermajority that can fight the cruel agenda of Project 2025.
Dismantling the Trap
On Inauguration Day, Trump will place his hand on the Bible and be sworn into office. The ceremony will take place on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol as jubilant Republicans plan to cut, cut, cut the federal budget. They want to cut poor people from social services, the sick from health care and undocumented workers from the country with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. They come armed with a plan: Project 2025, a 900-plus page tome of conservative policy crafted by the Heritage Foundation. When you look at it closely, you see more than budget cuts, it is a plan to institutionalize conservatism. It is state-sponsored, widespread suffering.
In contrast to Trump’s swearing in to office, just two miles away at the Lincoln Memorial, King gave the “I Have a Dream” speech in the 1963 March on Washington. Nearby is the Reflecting Pool, where after King’s murder in 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign built Resurrection City, a protest camp to make visible the multiracial poor. In downtown D.C. sits a massive statue of King called The Stone of Hope, engraved with his speeches. D.C. is filled with the King’s history; the man’s life was dedicated to expanding the circle of citizenship.
Trump’s inauguration on MLK Jr. Day highlights the clash of two opposing visions. MAGA wants to rebuild walls of racism, patriarchy and classism — even ending birthright citizenship. The left has fought to enlarge the circle of citizenship and include people of color, women, workers and LGBTQ folks. But the right has the White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court.
“I like one big beautiful bill,” Trump recently bragged at a news conference. His reconciliation bill, scheduled for April, can pass the Senate with a simple majority. It is the first step to Project 2025. And it’s a whopper. First up is the renewal of Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: basically tax cuts for the rich to the tune of $4 trillion. Think about it. The government will have $4 trillion less to fund services. Next are additional funds for ICE to brutally deport undocumented workers. What is obscene is that Republicans plan to plug the hole left by those tax cuts with $5 trillion in budget cuts.
Working in concert, Trump, the Republican-led House and Senate, and the right-wing Supreme Court threaten to dismantle King’s legacy.
And the cuts are sure to keep coming. Trump’s blueprint is Project 2025, which aims to take a chainsaw to programs that help the poor. Medicaid will be cut and the spending left to states. Project 2025 calls the U.S. Department of Agriculture a “welfare agency” and plans to cut SNAP (food stamps) and school meal programs. Project 2025 aims to dismantle the Department of Education and end federal aid to low-income schools. On housing, it calls for an end to the Housing Trust Fund, a federal grant to states to alleviate chronic homelessness. Project 2025’s plan for the Department of Justice is to shift its focus to prosecuting officials, colleges and private businesses that promote social justice. To cap it off, Project 2025 plans to remove any federal workers that get in the way of Trump’s agenda by using executive order Schedule F, which makes tens of thousands of them replaceable with Trump loyalists.
Project 2025 is an attack on workers, on the racially marginalized, on LGBTQ people and the poor. It will cause mass suffering and death. How? The U.S. has 304 million citizens. The Poor People’s Campaign calculates 140 million are poor and working poor, and 47 million go hungry, including 14 million children. At the bottom of this cruel class oppression are 771,800 unhoused people. All of this kills. The Journal of the American Medical Association cited poverty as the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S. each year as 183,000 people die from poverty-related causes. And nearly 45,000 die because they have no health insurance.
Project 2025 is an assault on vulnerable people. Trump and the Republicans are threatening to push the hungry deeper into hunger. They will make the sick sicker — and many, if you follow the math, inevitably will die. Project 2025 is racist because poverty in the United States is racialized; 21 percent of Indigenous people are poor, along with 17 percent of Black people and 16 percent of Latinos.
Project 2025 is also a trap. Republican budget cuts and extremist policies will compell people to protest them. Marches will roll like waves and hit the wall of police and draconian laws that Trump builds around his government. Anger will spike in the streets. When a window is broken or a police car is torched, the trap is sprung. Trump says he is eager to send in riot police or the military. He has already given a wink to far right groups like the Proud Boys that like to break bones.
This is why we have to turn to King again. His radical legacy is a blueprint to avoid the trap and defeat Project 2025.
A Tale of Two Kings
In April 1963, an incarcerated King wrote the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to push back against white moderates who feared conflict. He wrote, “I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’ I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth … we must create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”
In May 1963, his ideas came to life. King created tension not only from nonviolent direct action, but also from contrasting widely accepted values against less accepted ones: in this case, the universal value of children’s innocence versus white supremacy. Firefighters in Birmingham, Alabama, shot high-powered fire hoses at children. Police let dogs loose to tear at their clothes and skin. White supremacist and Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor ordered the assault on the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, in which thousands of Black children walked downtown to protest segregation. They were arrested and thrown in jail where they sang freedom songs. Reporters filmed it. The world saw the news and was shocked. A moribund civil rights movement was reenergized.
We can learn from King how to maneuver from a position of weakness. The civil rights movement faced hostile officials that used violence to suppress protests. We face similar threats under Trump and the Republican trifecta. King faced a hostile public raised on anti-Black racism. We likewise now face a public turned against “wokeness.” King faced interlocking laws from legal segregation, redlining and a racist criminal legal system. We face Project 2025, which seeks to recreate, to a degree, the state-sanctioned discrimination that our ancestors fought to end.
Project 2025 is a plan to institutionalize conservatism. It is state-sponsored, widespread suffering.
Project 2025 and the second Trump administration will surely set the stage for more protests. Again, images of families torn apart by government officials may soon spark rage. News of increased poverty and hunger will likely direct disgust at Trump and the GOP. Protests and lawsuits might hamper the Trump administration temporarily, but it is not enough. We must go beyond political trench warfare and build a progressive supermajority.
Here is where we shift from the “I Have a Dream” King to the later, more radical King. He realized the integration of Black people was just the first step; next was to integrate the poor and working class as well. Which is why, in 1966, he told his staff that the U.S. must “move toward a democratic socialism.”
Integration did not mean marginalized people transform themselves to fit into the U.S. mainstream. No, for King it meant that everyone has a place at the table. Capitalism must be replaced with democratic socialism, in which people are integrated by a government that answers their needs for food, housing and jobs with dignity. That’s why in 1968, King marched in Memphis with striking sanitation workers and told them in a sermon, “Whenever you are engaged in work that is at the service of humanity it has dignity and work. You are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.”
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory
We must now pick up the baton from the radical King of 1968. His legacy pulls the rug from under even the most powerful and violent regimes. King’s political adherents used his tactic of contrasting widely accepted values (in sociology known as “consensus values”) to less accepted ones. The goal is to make clear that most Americans already were progressive.
Rev. Jesse Jackson thundered in his climatic 1988 Democratic Convention speech, “What’s the moral challenge of our day? We have public accommodations. We have the right to vote. We have open housing. What’s the fundamental challenge of our day? It is to end economic violence.” He evoked a powerful image: “Most poor people are not lazy. They are not Black. They are not Brown. They are mostly white and female and young. But whether white, Black or Brown, a hungry baby’s belly turned inside out is the same color — color it pain; color it hurt; color it agony.”
In 2016, Anderson Cooper asked Sen. Bernie Sanders about his spirituality. Sanders said, “I believe as a human being that the pain one person feels, if we have children who are hungry, if we have elderly people who can’t afford their prescription drugs, that impacts you and that impacts me. My spirituality is that we are all in this together.”
Jackson and Sanders use King’s strategy of turning class warfare into a spiritual struggle between good and evil. Since class cuts across race and gender, it becomes a powerful leverage to topple a corrupt Trump administration the way that King toppled a corrupt Southern white supremacy — and to go further and build a supermajority. The Democratic Party’s liberal politics will fail unless there is a call for economic justice.
We are in a two-front struggle. The Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP and the ACLU are preparing to fight Trump in the courts and at the ballot box. Yet the neoliberal Democratic Party is exhausted. Now the left has a historic chance to follow King’s footsteps and mobilize the poor and workers. To say clearly that integration means recognizing the working class — the janitors, mass transit drivers, nurses and undocumented day laborers — who make life possible.
For King, the Memphis strike wasn’t just a class conflict; it was a spiritual struggle to redeem humanity. We are not fully realized until we accept responsibility for the relationships we are in with others. That’s why King marched with the sanitation workers.
All around you is the world our forebears in the civil rights movement created for us. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass are here. Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer. And Martin Luther King Jr. They’re still here, marching in spirit. They’re still leading us.
Defying Trump’s right-wing agenda from Day One
Inauguration Day is coming up soon, and at Truthout, we plan to defy Trump’s right-wing agenda from Day One.
Looking to the first year of Trump’s presidency, we know that the most vulnerable among us will be harmed. Militarized policing in U.S. cities and at the borders will intensify. The climate crisis will deteriorate further. The erosion of free speech has already begun, and we anticipate more attacks on journalism.
It will be a terrifying four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. But we’re not falling to despair, because we know there are reasons to believe in our collective power.
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