Donald Trump and Martin Luther King Jr.

Plus, senators on “genocidal” Xi; Garber’s call to “end the occupation”

Martin Luther King as pictured on a 1999 U.S. postage stamp. National Postal Museum.

Merely mentioning President Trump in the same breath as Martin Luther King Jr. will probably be enough to make some readers’ heads explode at the juxtaposition of an intensely disliked politician and a sainted civil rights hero.

Yet you don’t have to be a Trump loyalist to see certain parallels. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested 29 times. Now Trump, too, finds himself as a defendant in a criminal proceeding brought by political enemies.

New York State Supreme Court acting justice Juan Merchan is, with gag orders, restricting what Trump can say. By requiring Trump to attend the trial, Merchan is restricting Trump’s ability to travel and campaign. The judge is doing this even though Trump is on the verge of being formally nominated as the Republican presidential candidate.

President Biden says “democracy is on the ballot” in 2024, yet Biden’s political allies are prosecuting Biden’s main political rival, threatening to imprison him.

You don’t have to be a conservative or a Trump backer to find the New York case, brought by prosecutor Alvin Bragg, weak. Even the New York Times ran an opinion piece by a law professor at Boston University, Jed Handelsman Shugerman, calling it “an embarrassment, in terms of prosecutorial ethics and apparent selectivity” and also “a cautionary tale about broader prosecutorial abuses in America.” A second Times opinion piece, from Matthew Schmitz, likens Trump to Robin Hood, an “outlaw hero,” observing, “When the authorities are regarded as corrupt and malevolent, people will celebrate those who defy them.”

Why does the establishment feel so threatened by Trump? I’ve likened Trump to the “wrecking ball” of the Bruce Springsteen song.

In his first term, Trump shattered some of the icons of the Washington establishment. He withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. He moved the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. He forged the Abraham Accords. He renegotiated trade agreements. He tried to crack down on illegal immigration.

It all sends the Washington establishment into such a panic that one of its members, Peter Baker of the New York Times, reports that his colleagues are scrambling to find other countries to escape to during Trump’s second term. As Baker writes, “Washington’s fear is the point. He is the disrupter of the elite. He is coming to break up their corrupt ‘uniparty’ hold on power. If establishment Washington is upset about the possibility that he returns, that is a selling point to his base around the country that is alienated from the people in power.”

It sent me looking for King’s classic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Dated April 16, 1963, it rewards a close reading. It’s remembered today largely for King’s statement that “over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate.”

King writes that he was initially disappointed at being described as an extremist but gradually came around to the idea that “perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

Yet what resonates most today about the letter is less the moderation-extremism dichotomy and more King’s embrace of American, Jewish, and Christian ideals. “One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

King defends civil disobedience against unjust laws: “In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience. We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.” (Incidentally, this is a particularly appropriate message for today, which is Holocaust Remembrance Day.)

King draws a contrast between his own approach and the “hatred and despair” of Black Muslims. He calls them, disparagingly, “people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible ‘devil.’”

Trump has been likening himself to Nelson Mandela, another jailed political leader. Perhaps King is a better figure to look to. One of Trump’s last first-term acts was issuing, on January 15, 2021, a proclamation on the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. It says, “In the face of tumult and upheaval, Dr. King reminded us to always meet anger with compassion in order to truly ‘heal the hurts, right the wrongs and change society.’  It is with this same spirit of forgiveness that we come together to bind the wounds of past injustice by lifting up one another regardless of race, gender, creed, or religion, and rising to the first principles enshrined in our founding documents.”

Regardless of the trial outcome or the election outcome, and long after Trump, like King, passes into history, those first principles are what will endure. From jail in Alabama, King concludes with the hope that “the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation.”