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Donald Trump's bizarre, ignorant statements likening North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson to Martin Luther King offer a window into the former president's personality and character.
Trump has a knack for comparing himself favorably to history's greatest leaders. He repeatedly claims that he's done more for Black Americans than any other president, with Abraham Lincoln being the possible exception. Amid reports that crowd sizes at his rallies were falling, Trump said he had spoken before crowds larger than the 250,000 gathered between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument in 1963 as Martin Luther King sought to appeal to his nation's conscience.
Trump veered into uniquely delusional territory earlier this year when he said Robinson, the North Carolina Republican gubernatorial nominee, is twice the leader that King was and is "Martin Luther King on steroids." News reports about Robinson's past online activities have led to clips of those remarks airing almost everywhere—including in Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign ads.
Robinson reportedly used a porn site forum to describe himself as a "Black Nazi." He said he would have no objection to the return of slavery and would take the opportunity to purchase and enslave a few people himself. Amid comments about his tastes in porn and affinity for voyeurism, he also used the forum to refer to King with an insult favored by Ku Klux Klan leaders.
While Trump's fulsome descriptions of Robinson and enthusiastic political endorsement came before these reports, Robinson had already made plenty of racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and antisemitic statements publicly.
Robinson's political brand aligns with Trump's. So, Trump was eager to showcase him as his ideal Black man, as someone the MAGA movement would admire. Trump relished the chance to pronounce Robinson superior to King as a leader and speaker. Whether he believes such a preposterous assertion isn't the point. Trump's aim is to diminish King's legacy, about which he likely knows little.
One thing he certainly knows is that King is a man deeply admired by generations of Americans of all backgrounds and beloved, in particular, by Black Americans. Americans associate King with greatness. He's a martyr, who is in some ways deified.
As has been the case with Lincoln and former president Barack Obama, Trump has now engaged in a strange kind of competition with King's legacy. He's also engaged in a kind of fantasy that admiration for him would be broader and more clearly recognized if not for his mistreatment by the news media, entertainers, and sports stars who turned down White House visits while he was president.
Trump's attempt to persuade his followers to reconsider what King represents is nothing new in Republican politics and conservative circles. Throughout King's life and career devoted to advancing civil rights and social justice, the American Right pushed a narrative that he was a dangerous radical and collaborator with communists. Today, Republican elected officials and others on the Right are more likely to use rhetoric to try to co-opt the message and legacy of one of the most revered figures of the 20th century.
In the 56 years since his assassination, King's legacy and words have landed him in an exalted place in the American consciousness, with that rare status of having his birth observed with a national holiday.
Frequently on that holiday weekend, Republican office holders will issue statements about King that are tailored to their political agendas, taking King's words out of context and turning them into platitudes. Conservatives working against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in employment and education specialize in using King's words to argue that white Americans are now the main targets of racial discrimination while Black Americans routinely benefit from preferential treatment.
Vivek Ramaswamy, for example, offered his take on King's legacy while seeking the Republican presidential nomination and arguing for elimination of DEI initiatives. He said, "We're close to that promised land" that King described but still "obsess about systemic racism and white guilt."
Another candidate for the party's presidential nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, used his own brand of logic to claim that King would have favored book bans.
Here's one quote from King that you will never see Republicans share:
"It is obvious if a man is entered at the starting line in a race 300 years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat to catch up with his fellow runner."
Then there these are lines from the address at the 1963 March on Washington that has become known as the "I Have a Dream" speech. King spoke of the "promissory note" the Constitution and Declaration of Independence represent:
This note was a promise that all men, yes, Black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked "insufficient funds."
Instead of invoking the arguments King made in his most well-known speech, conservatives emphasize the notion of a "dream" and go no further. That's unsurprising because they constantly remind everyone that they despise all that is "woke."
King spoke about what he believed to be his country's responsibility to provide redress for denying Black people human and civil rights and economic justice. It was a call for an awakening and for action, for an America that is truly, fully woke.
Mark Allan Williams is an opinion editor and essayist living in Baltimore.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
