How Trump Convinced White People He’s Their Martin Luther King Jr.

By ending DEI in federal government, Trump is proving to the most dominant racial group in the land that they are free at last.

“To the Black and Hispanic communities, I want to thank you for the tremendous outpouring of love and trust that you have shown me with your vote. We set records and I will not forget it. I’ve heard your voices in the campaign, and I look forward to working with you in the years to come. Today is Martin Luther King Day, and his honor — this will be a great honor — but in his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.”

— President Donald J. Trump, Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2025.

During his first term, I once called Donald Trump “the Miss Millie of presidents and the Milli Vanilli of white saviors.” Well, T-Millie is back, and he’s always been good to you people!

Watching a loud and proud white nationalist return to power after declaring himself as Black America’s benefactor has been frustrating. While he has claimed he's been “the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln,” he has served as white people's MLK by convincing them that undoing pro-white racism is actually anti-white racism.

He was barely even officially sworn in when he signed a sweeping executive order to end DEI practices in the federal government. The order revoked a civil rights measure signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who famously worked with Dr. King to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of ’65. The measure prevented federal contractors from engaging in hiring discrimination "based on race, color, religion, and national origin."

That’s what Trump is promising to do — for white people.

Trump is not even a clever man. He's a bumbling idiot billionaire who had never governed, legislated or busted a judiciary grape in his life, but, somehow, managed to Mr. Magoo his way into the White House once and then a second time after he inspired a domestic terrorist attack at the U.S. Capitol via endless election fraud propaganda that neither he nor his legal team ever produced a single shred of tangible evidence to substantiate.

I wish Trump was a slick talker. I wish he was the savvy, charismatic, sharp-witted silver-tongued devil that he and his cultists purport him to be. At least it would all make sense. Trump is an ignorant, inarticulate, boorish blowhard, with the intellectual capacity of a toddler and the charisma of a septuagenarian Jar Jar Binks, and I can only assume he’s such a successful liar, propagandist and manipulator, not because he’s smart, but because the people he has to convince are really fucking stupid.

Trump is the most aggravating kind of racist because he’s convincing stupid people that he’s actually bringing about racial harmony. Even now, with the election behind him, he’s still trying to sell himself as Black people’s great white hope. He keeps trying to make Dr. King his late play cousin as if he didn't exclusively target cities with large Black populations with his election fraud lies, threatening to disenfranchise the very people whose voting rights King fought to protect.

During his inauguration speech, after he invoked Dr. King’s name and promised Black and brown people he would pick up the “dream” baton and Pied Piper us the rest of the way to the Promised Land, Trump reiterated his intention to “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life” and promised to “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.”

In that part of his speech, Trump has engaged in the 400-year-long Caucasian-American practice referred to in the 21st century as “playing around in Black people’s faces.”

Trump knows he can trust his white, fragile and perpetually aggrieved constituents not to do bare-minimum research on what DEI actually is. They think armies of DEI recruiters are swarming every ghetto in NegroesDownBadsville, USA, spotting random Black people in the streets and saying, “Hey, nigga, you wanna be a pilot?”

All DEI does is remove systematically placed roadblocks that have historically prevented marginalized groups — including people of color, women, LGBTQ+ folks, disabled people and people of a certain age — from receiving the same opportunities white men have always enjoyed. DEI candidates still have to show they are qualified, but due to societal bigotry, they’re forced to defend their qualifications in ways white men are rarely challenged to because they’re assumed to have gotten in on merit.

But white people don’t give a shit about merit. They elected Trump in 2016 despite the fact that he had zero experience holding political office, and they voted him in again in 2024 after claiming ad nauseam that Kamala Harris was woefully under-qualified for the presidency despite her eight years as San Francisco’s 27th district attorney, seven years as California’s 32nd attorney general, four years as a U.S. senator and four years as vice president of the United States.

Trump doesn’t give a shit about merit. For the position of secretary of defense, he selected Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host with zero national defense experience to replace Lloyd Austin — the Black four-star general who served as our 28th national defense secretary after serving as the 12th commander of U.S. Central Command and the 33rd vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army.

When Trump claims he wants to return America to a “society that is colorblind and merit-based,” which it has never been, he’s really just promising to return it to a society of default white male dominance. To white people, he sold DEI as anti-white discrimination, and he tried to spin his promise to outlaw it as something that would be good for Black people.

Trump's anti-DEI warpath has now spilled outside of the federal government. Major retailers like Target now appear to be following Orange Jussolini's marching orders, rolling back its own DEI initiatives, which, in Target's case, includes ending a program focused on carrying more products from Black or minority-owned businesses. HOW IS THAT GOOD FOR BLACK PEOPLE, TRILLI VANILLI?

White people think Trump is their Dr. King, but, really, he’s a less savvy, less silver-tongued and far less charismatic variant of Nucky Thompson from HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.

In the above clip, Thompson, a politician and gangster in Atlantic City during the Prohibition era, is seen speaking to a congregation of Black people about bringing Klan members to justice for the murders of four Black men in their community. At some point, after telling the “members of our colored community” that he has regarded them as his “friends and equals,” his speech transitions to one of promise to rid the community of the “obstreperous negro,” just before the camera pans back to the crowd, revealing an all-white audience.

This is Donald Trump. (I mean, there’s no way in hell he knows the word “obstreperous,” but still.)

Trump tells Black people that immigrants are stealing our “Black jobs” then turns around and tells white people that unqualified Black people are stealing their “merit-based” jobs. He’s more Bull Connor than MLK.

Again, the only reason Trump succeeds as a master manipulator is because white supremacy and idiocracy have already done all of the heavy lifting for him. How else does one convince the most powerful and dominant racial group in the country that they’re an oppressed minority — then tell them they're free at last?