Opinion: Inaugurating the insurrectionist puts us into uncharted territory

Mark Robinowitz: My name is Mark Robinowitz. Jan. 20, 2025 will be the federal Martin Luther King holiday, honoring one of the most courageous Americans in our history. It will also be the inauguration of the insurrectionist who on Jan. 6, 2021, sought to decapitate elected leadership to prevent congressional confirmation of Joe Biden’s election as president.

[00:00:31] Donald Trump will swear at the Constitution, not to it, in flagrant violation of the 14th Amendment, which states: ‘Section 3. No person shall… hold any office, civil or military, under the United States (such as president)… who, having previously taken an oath… as an officer of the United States… to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.’

[00:01:04] In other words, Donald is not qualified to be president, no different than if he was under 35 years old or was not born in the United States. This is very straightforward, but we are obviously no longer a constitutional republic—for countless reasons, not just this one.

[00:01:25] And inaugurating the insurrectionist puts us into uncharted territory. Even President Nixon’s Watergate scandal was minor in comparison. Since former President Jimmy Carter died just before New Year’s, the traditional flying of the American flag at half-mast for 30 days means the flag will officially be in a state of mourning for Inauguration Day.

[00:01:52] Donald’s presence in politics has been sane-washed by corporate media treating him as normal. MLK’s legacy has been whitewashed to ignore his evolution as a prophet who spoke against what he called the triple evils afflicting America: racism, economic injustice, and militarism.

[00:02:18] For decades, the King family has said Martin was martyred because he expanded his advocacy beyond civil rights. Martin Luther King holiday is a federal holiday for a victim of the federal government.

[00:02:36] I have a quote from King’s speech on the war in Vietnam exactly a year before he was killed.

[00:02:48] Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 4, 1967): I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we, as a nation, must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin, we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.

[00:03:39] Mark Robinowitz: Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 to honor decades of courageous nonviolent pressure for civil rights. And he said in his 1967 Vietnam speech that the Nobel Prize for Peace was a commission to ‘work harder than I’d ever worked before.’

[00:04:00] Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 4, 1967): I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.

[00:04:18] Mark Robinowitz: And he added:

[00:04:20] Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 4, 1967): Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind.

[00:04:50] Mark Robinowitz: In contrast, the incoming Donald administration is promoting toxic, extreme nationalism, not empathy for the world as a whole, which is actually ironic given that his advisors and puppeteers are creating a fascist international.

[00:05:13] Donald has been a lifelong racist, dating at least to when the Richard Nixon administration sued the Trump organization for their racist rental policies. In the 1980s, Trump campaigned for the Central Park Five to be given the death penalty, and had no apology when they were exonerated as factually innocent after they had spent years of their early lives in jail.

[00:05:42] When Obama was president, Trump was the leading spreader of quote, birther, unquote, disinformation that pretended that Obama had been born in Kenya, not Hawaii, USA. As president, Trump promoted a wide range of cruel policies and praised neo-Nazis as fine people.

[00:06:05] Trump 2.0 has appointed a variety of racists, including Stephen Miller, an advisor to the president; Tom Homan, in charge of deportations and internment camps; and R.F.K. Jr., who claims COVID was engineered to spare Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews, a modern update of medieval blood libel.

[00:06:32] Martin Luther King also talked about economic injustice and imperialism in his 1967 speech, Where do we go from here? He said, quote:

[00:06:44] Martin Luther King, Jr. (Aug. 16, 1967): Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. The kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis.

[00:07:16] It’s found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

[00:07:46] Mark Robinowitz: In contrast, the de facto incoming president, Elon Musk, is the richest man ever, worth somewhere around $400 billion, on his way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire. The broligarchs, who are the real masters of Donald Trump, could have used their unprecedented wealth to solve countless problems in our society, but their greed knows no bounds.

[00:08:21] They want to loot, excuse me, privatize, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, the VA, and other social safety nets to accumulate more and more and more.

[00:08:40] One propaganda technique that the Trump administration used in the reelection campaign was to pretend that Donald is a man of peace, and he is really for undoing the permanent war machine, which we’ve had since World War II, which sounds great, except it is utter nonsense. Donald, as president for the first time, threatened nuclear war, engaged in continued war in multiple countries, praised militaristic structures, increased military spending, worshipped generals (until some of them balked at his illegal policies), and most importantly, waged war against our own country.

[00:09:29] COVID mismanagement led to more American deaths than from all wars since 1776 combined, and on Jan. 6, 2021, Donald tried to murder his own vice president and Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, and others in Congress. The first time in U. S. history this has even happened.

[00:09:58] The Trump administration also facilitated stochastic terrorism against critics, Democrats, dissident Republicans like Liz Cheney, scientists, advocates for mitigating COVID, and other policies that Trump did not appreciate.

[00:10:20] For the revival, Donald Trump has suggested to the government of Israel that the destruction of Gaza should be accelerated, is threatening to wage war against Iran, and perhaps most alarming, his nominee for secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, is a Christofascist who has Crusader tattoos and an enormous chip on his shoulder about the state of the world that is scary, to be polite.

[00:10:56] Where do you even begin to start in discussing the grifters, idiots, thieves, incompetents who have been nominated for the new administration? It’s almost like the incoming administration has been having contests to see who are the worst possible picks. Kakistocracy. Rule by the incompetents.

[00:11:23] The disease promoters who will take over the health system if Donald gets his way—RFK Jr. is the most obvious. He is a literal virus denier who says we should stop studying the risk of infectious disease, even as bird flu, is spreading through the country, killing cats, harming people, and possibly has the potential to become a pandemic, perhaps worse than COVID. This is not the time to be turning off the public health system, but that ship has sailed.

[00:12:11] A huge number of people think that medical advice is something to ignore, or worse, attack. And maybe we’ll find out the hard way that viruses don’t care about anybody’s politics.

[00:12:26] We are in for a very rough time, but it’s also very unstable. And like a certain administration in Germany 90 years ago, MAGA is unstable. And in the last few days, it’s been somewhat delightful in a way to see the splits within the MAGA movement come to the surface where the diehard racists and the tech bros are fighting each other and having arguments that suggest not only will the next four years be full of chaos, but the instability may help us blunt the worst impacts of their policies.

Mark Robinowitz publishes www.JFKMLKRFK.com, “Legacy of the Sixties: Coup In America.” Image courtesy Harris & Ewing, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

President-elect Donald Trump responded: “The Democrats are all ‘giddy’ about our magnificent American Flag potentially being at ‘half mast’ during my Inauguration. They think it’s so great, and are so happy about it because, in actuality, they don’t love our Country, they only think about themselves. Look at what they’ve done to our once GREAT America over the past four years – It’s a total mess! In any event, because of the death of President Jimmy Carter, the Flag may, for the first time ever during an Inauguration of a future President, be at half mast. Nobody wants to see this, and no American can be happy about it. Let’s see how it plays out. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

2025 will mark the second time the flag appears at half-staff during a presidential inauguration. President Harry S. Truman died Dec. 26, 1972, just before the Jan. 20, 1973 inauguration of President Richard M. Nixon.