MLKJr or DJT: Who's the Greater?

Which American titan do you revere more?

Donald Trump seems to live in a state of perpetual exultation. The prospect of restoring America’s greatness energizes him and fills him with joy. That’s the good news. The less good news is that, in his heightened state, he occasionally overstates things. Such was the case, demographers tell us, when he said that his If You Don’t Fight Like Hell, You Won’t Have a Country Left speech on January 6, 2021 in Washington DC was better attended than Martin Luther King Jr’s famous I Have a Dream speech 58 years before in the same venue, as the finale of the historic March on Washington. 

About the MJK speech being better attended no doubt remains. The House Jan. 6 committee believed Mr. Trump’s speech to have drawn a crowd of approximately 53,000 supporters, whereas the National Park Service reported "an estimated 250,000 people" attended Dr. King’s. Even if that latter figure had been reduced in accordance with Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution — which stated that, for the purpose of determining congressional representation, enslaved people were to be counted as three-fifths of a free person — the King audience was about three times the size of the Trump one. And many of those who watched Dr. King deliver I Have a Dream were the descendants of slaves, but not actually enslaved themselves, which would further dilute Mr. Trump’s claim.  

The more interesting question, though, concerns which speech was the more momentous. While it’s impossible only three and a half years later to know if Mr. Trump’s Fight Like Hell or You Won’t Have a Country Left will be viewed in decades to come as having been as momentous as I Have a Dream, one can assert quite credibly in the summer of 2024 that Mr. Trump’s was the more stirring oration. Consider that seven people died after Fight Like Hell, whereas not a single casualty was recorded after I Have a Dream. Fight Like Hell emboldened aggrieved patriots to risk life and limb to try to overturn what they believed, because Mr. Trump said it was so, to have been a stolen election, while I Have a Dream managed only to get several thousand people choked up about racism, one of the most hallowed American traditions. 

Five people died within a few hours of Mr. Trump’s speech, one as a result of being shot by Capitol Police, another of a drug overdose, and three, including a police officer, of natural causes. Many were injured, including 174 police officers. Four other officers who responded to the attack killed themselves within seven months. Of the quarter-million assembled to hear I Have a Dream, probably many more killed themselves, but because of hopeelessness borne of racism, rather than because of the power of Dr. King’s speech.

Mr. Trump’s stirring oratory nearly resulted in the hanging of a vice president of the United States (for declining to illegally subvert a presidential election). No vice president, or even senator or congressperson, was threatened with harm as result of Dr. King’s oration, which we can now say was far less momentous.

Many historians argue also about the relative power and consequentiality of the two men’s writings. While Dr. King’s famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail, which asserted that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws, is revered as one of the most important historical statement ever composed by a political prisoner, and is considered a classic of civil disobedience, But President Trump has done remarkable writing of his own, such as his famous first Christmas tweet of 2023: 

“THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN, LIED TO CONGRESS, CHEATED ON FISA, RIGGED A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, ALLOWED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, MANY FROM PRISONS & MENTAL INSTITUTIONS, TO INVADE OUR COUNTRY, SCREWED UP IN AFGHANISTAN, & JOE BIDEN’S MISFITS & THUGS, LIKE DERANGED JACK SMITH, ARE COMING AFTER ME, AT LEVELS OF PERSECUTION NEVER SEEN BEFORE IN OUR COUNTRY??? IT’S CALLED ELECTION INTERFERENCE. MERRY CHRISTMAS!” 

Many experts have described that as a classic of vindictiveness, others as the summit of English-language petulance, and others still as a high water mark in paranoid narcissism, but Mr. Trump had only been warming up. Later that day, in both mixed upper and lowercase and all-caps, he conferred Yuletide benedictions on “both good and bad” world leaders before comparing them favorably to his detractors at home. “None ... are as evil and ‘sick’ as the THUGS we have inside our Country who, with their Open Borders, INFLATION, Afghanistan Surrender, Green New Scam, High Taxes, No Energy Independence, Woke Military, Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Iran, All Electric Car Lunacy, and so much more, are looking to destroy our once great USA. MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

On the one hand, then, we have a later-martyred civil rights leader arguing for tolerance between the races, and on the other, a great leader later to Take a Bullet for Democracy, though the bullet actually missed him, daring to point out the moral failings of those whose apparent goal was to “destroy our once great USA,” without hyphenating “once-great”.

Have both these American giants had many detractors? Be sure of it! In the years of his assassination, 75 percent of those interviewed by the Harris Poll disapproved of Dr. King. In the YouGov/The Economist’s poll of 1420 Americans chosen at random at the end of July 2024, only 56 percent viewed Donald Trump unfavorably, suggesting that 44 percent of Americans are too fucking stupid or gullible to be allowed to reproduce, though of course a great many have, including Stephen Miller.