Politics

5 takeaways from California's first 2024 U.S. Senate election debate

Published

12 months ago

January 23, 2024

5 takeaways from California's first 2024 U.S. Senate election debate

California’s sleepy race to determine who will succeed Sen. Dianne Feinstein came alive Monday night at USC, when three congressional Democrats and a former-Dodger-turned-Republican-candidate clashed over the war in Gaza and pitched their plans to address homelessness and protect reproductive freedoms.

Reps. Adam B. Schiff of Burbank, Katie Porter of Irvine and Barbara Lee of Oakland delighted in ripping into former baseball star Steve Garvey — a newcomer to politics and supporter of former President Trump — who appeared at times bemused and at times unprepared for the pile-on.

“Once a Dodger, always a Dodger,” Porter said, a shot at Garvey after he refused to say whether he’d vote for Trump this fall.

Monday’s debate, hosted by Fox 11 News and Politico, was the first of three scheduled before the March 5 primary election, when California voters will decide which two candidates will face off in November to decide the winner of one of the most coveted and powerful political posts in the state.

Up until the debate, the trio of Democrats had crisscrossed California and stayed focused on their vision for the state without descending into mudslinging. Monday was different. Porter homed in on the longtime political careers of Lee and Schiff, asserting that they accomplished little during their time in office — particularly when it came to passing healthcare reform and addressing the lack of affordable housing in California.

The latest polling from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times, shows Schiff leading among likely voters, with 21% support compared with 17% for Porter and 13% for Garvey. Lee trails in fourth with 9%.

Monday’s showdown — which was televised statewide and broadcast on the radio — may help sway the roughly 21% of likely voters who report being undecided and who could determine the fate of the race.

For many, the debate was their first real glimpse at the candidates campaigning for the job.

Here are five takeaways from the first Senate debate in California.

Israel exposed the deepest divide

The war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza prompted some of the most vitriolic jousting from Porter, Lee and Schiff, who represent the spectrum of the Democratic Party on the subject. The trio disagree on little, but Lee’s call for a cease-fire the day after the attack on Israel stood in stark contrast to Schiff’s unflinching support for Israel. Schiff, who is Jewish, said that he backs President Biden’s path to pressure Israel to minimize civilian casualties but not say Israel should stop its operations in Gaza.

Schiff also said he was heartbroken by the loss of life among Palestinians, and said he supported the creation of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state that would exist alongside Israel.

“I support a two-state solution … but Israel has to defend itself,” Schiff said. “We can’t leave Hamas governing Gaza. They are still holding over 100 hostages, including Americans. I don’t know how you can ask any nation to cease fire when their people are being held by a terrorist organization.”

Israel’s attacks have resulted in the deaths of at least 25,000 people in Gaza, according to health authorities there, and accusations that Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, which killed at least 1,200 in Israel and left a nation traumatized, amounted to genocide.

“Killing 25,000 civilians, it’s catastrophic, and it will never lead to peace for the Israelis, nor the Palestinians,” Lee said.

Unlike Schiff and Lee, who each took firm positions in support or opposition of aid to the Israeli army, Porter hedged. She reiterated that Israel should work “toward a lasting bilateral cease-fire in Gaza,” and said she wanted all the hostages freed and the resources to rebuild Gaza, as well as to ensure Israel is secure and a Palestinian state “can thrive.”

“Cease-fire is not a magic word,” Porter said. “You can’t say it and make it so.”

The discussion reflected the anger and polarization among voters on the subject. Recent Times polling found that Schiff supporters were far more likely to approve of Biden’s response to the war than Garvey or Lee supporters. Porter backers were split down the middle about how they felt about Biden’s diplomatic response.

For his part, Garvey said he backed Israel.

The controversy spilled outside the hall, where dozens of protesters chanted “cease-fire now” and decried the United States’ support of Israel in its invasion of Gaza.

Garvey struggled to articulate how he’d govern

The former Dodgers first baseman, who ended his all-star career with the San Diego Padres, appeared at ease onstage even as he struggled to articulate how he’d govern. Garvey tried to sell himself as an open-minded political outsider, unspoiled by Washington.

“California, with its vibrancy, led this country,” Garvey said of his early days in the state. “And then, all of a sudden, one party started to take over. There was only one voice in California. And this vibrant state became a murmur. As a conservative moderate, I thought it was time to stand up.”

Garvey joked about how his appearance “stimulated” a series of baseball references from his Democratic opponents, but Garvey himself peppered his remarks with sports metaphors and compared the U.S. Senate to being involved in a “team sport.” He counted his leadership during championships as a qualification for one of the highest political offices in the nation.

After being attacked for his past support of Trump and his refusal to say whether he’d vote for him again, Garvey lashed out at Porter and likened her criticism to the Houston Astros cheating on the way to winning the 2017 World Series against the Dodgers.

“You’re banging on that trash can just like the Astros did,” Garvey said — referring to how Astros players signaled teammates at the plate which pitch to expect.

Garvey entered the race late, forgoing a high-profile public campaign, and has been steadily climbing in the polls. The longevity of his appeal, however, may be threatened by his support for Trump — who remains despised by a strong majority of California voters — and his silence on some of the most divisive political issues of the day, including Israel.

At one point Porter pushed Garvey to say if he believed in a two-state solution in Israel. Garvey responded that it was “naive to think that a two-state solution can happen even in our generation.”

With Schiff in the lead, everyone else fights for second

Under California’s “jungle primary” system, the two candidates who receive the most votes in the March primary advance to the November election regardless of political party. That’s good news for Schiff, who has a $35-million war chest and is building a healthy lead in the polls.

The recent UC Berkeley poll found that Schiff’s support among likely voters has risen from 14% in May 2023 to 21% in January.

Schiff went into the debate attempting to stay above the fray and avoid attacks from the candidates scrambling for second place. That changed Monday. Porter and Garvey, in a tight race for second, both went after the longtime Burbank congressman.

The former baseball player called Schiff a “liar” for his work on the congressional committee that investigated the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and asserted that the former president had colluded with Moscow during the 2016 campaign.

“Sir, you lied to 300 million people. You can’t take that back,” Garvey said. He said Schiff had been censured by House Republicans for lying.

Schiff used the attack to reiterate the case against Trump.

“I was censured for standing up to a corrupt president,” Schiff responded. “And you know something? I would do it all over again. Because that corrupt president, that president that’s been indicted with 91 felony counts, that president that you won’t refuse to support? Yeah, he’s a danger.”

Porter also attacked Schiff for taking political donations from fossil fuel companies, which she said undermined his past accomplishments of going after polluters when he was a federal prosecutor.

“First of all, I gave that money to you, Katie Porter,” said Schiff, who supported Porter’s runs for Congress. “And the only response I got was, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ But look, at the end of the day, it’s about what have you gotten done? I didn’t hear anything from Representative Porter about anything she’s actually accomplished.”

GOP candidate won’t take a stand on Trump

In a rare moment of unity, all three Democrats demanded that Garvey explain why he had voted for Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections and whether he would vote for him again.

“Both times, he was the best person for the job,” Garvey said.

Garvey criticized Hillary Clinton as “entitled” and said Biden “stayed in the basement and only came out in controlled environments” during the 2020 campaign. He defended Trump’s record on national security and the economy but wouldn’t say whether he would vote for him again in 2024.

Schiff pressed Garvey on what he thought about Trump supporters violently attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop the peaceful transition of power after the former president falsely claimed the election was stolen.

“What more do you need to see of what he’s done to be able to say that you will not support him, that you will not vote to put him back in office? What more do any of us need to see?” Schiff said.

Garvey fumed that Schiff was “trying to paint me into the corner, trying to call me MAGA, mislead … I’m my own man. I make my own decisions.”

Porter and Lee didn’t let Garvey dismiss questions about his loyalty to Trump, however.

“He … refused to answer the question. Ballots go out in six weeks, Mr. Garvey. This is not the minor leagues,” Porter said. “Who will you vote for?”

Lee added: “You cannot waffle on this. You have to say if you support the MAGA extremist Republican agenda, led by Donald Trump to dismantle our democracy. Do you support that or not?”

Clash over abortion rights

The fight for the top two spots occasionally forced the three Democrats, who are all colleagues in Congress and have mostly similar policy views, to abandon their longtime approach of ignoring one another. Attacking the front-runner can pay off for candidates jockeying for a better position, but it runs the risk of alienating voters who don’t like to see internecine conflict between Democrats.

Porter lashed out at Schiff for listing abortion rights as an accomplishment on his campaign website in a post-Roe vs. Wade era, when millions of Americans have lost access to abortion services.

“As a mother of a young daughter, I do not feel like abortion rights have been accomplished,” Porter said.

Schiff responded that he has been a vocal backer of reproductive freedom, and that the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe vs. Wade — upending a half-century of precedent on the constitutional right to an abortion — “has endangered the health and safety of millions of women.” He said he supports a law to legalize abortion nationally, and an expansion of the Supreme Court.

“When we start losing our rights as Americans, it is a sure sign that our democracy is in trouble,” Schiff said.

Lee said that as a teenager, she became pregnant and decided with her mother that her best option was to have an illegal abortion in Mexico. The dark clinic in a back alley was terrifying, she said. The experience was terrifying, she said.

She said she would work to eliminate the filibuster and end the Hyde Amendment, a ban on federal funding for abortion services.

Garvey said he would not vote for a federal ban on abortion, and that if elected, he would “support the voice of the people of California,” who in 2022 voted to codify the right to abortion in the state Constitution.

Politics

The Trump Resistance Won’t Be Putting on ‘Pussy Hats’ This Time

Published

2 hours ago

January 19, 2025

Press Room

The Trump Resistance Won’t Be Putting on ‘Pussy Hats’ This Time

The week after Election Day in 2016, Shirley Morganelli, a women’s health nurse and lifelong Democrat, invited a dozen friends over to the living room of her rowhouse in Bethlehem, Pa., for a glass of wine. Actually, many glasses.

“Misery loves company,” she said.

Ms. Morganelli’s friends, mostly women then in their 50s and 60s, were teachers, nurses, artists and ardent supporters of Hillary Clinton. Some of them had dressed in suffragist white to cast their votes that day, expecting to celebrate the election of America’s first female president. Instead, they had ended the night consoling their college-aged daughters.

“When she called me at three o’clock in the morning — I get all choked up now, because it was the first time I couldn’t say, ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’” said Angela Sinkler, a nurse and former school board member in Bethlehem.

The get-together — Ms. Morganelli called it “unhappy hour” — became a regular event. By the end of the month, commiserating had turned into organizing. They started with writing postcards to elected officials calling on them to oppose Donald J. Trump’s agenda, then moved on to raising money for a local Planned Parenthood chapter and joining in community protests.

Local political candidates began showing up to their gatherings, too, and the group, now called Lehigh Valley ROAR, turned to campaigning. In 2018, several members were elected to City Council in Bethlehem, and Susan Wild, the city solicitor in nearby Allentown and old friend of Ms. Morganelli’s, was elected to Congress with the group’s support.

Lehigh Valley ROAR was one of more than 2,000 similar grass-roots groups formed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s first election — a moment of mass organization larger than even the Tea Party movement at its peak during President Barack Obama’s first term, said Theda Skocpol, a Harvard University professor of government and sociology who has studied both movements.

A vast majority of the groups were led by women, and many traced a similar arc to Ms. Morganelli’s, their shock at Mr. Trump’s election sparking political activism and then, often, electoral victories.

But then there was the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

As Mr. Trump returns to the White House on Monday with a popular vote majority and a governing trifecta in Washington, there are few signs of the sort of mass public protest that birthed “the resistance” the last time he took office.

Mr. Trump’s inauguration in 2017 was met with the largest single-day public demonstration in American history. Although thousands marched in Washington Saturday and smaller protests were held in other cities, their numbers fell far short of the hundreds of thousands that rallied eight years ago.

Organizers of the 2017 efforts say this shift reflects the lessons learned from the street protests that took place early in the first Trump presidency, tactics that were quickly abandoned in favor of more strategic organizing — and that opposition to a second Trump term is unlikely to take the same forms.

But some concede that the opposition is more uncertain than it once was. Congressional Democrats and governors now openly debate the wisdom of locking arms against Mr. Trump’s agenda, as they eventually did during his first presidency. And Democrats still now bear scars from last year’s conflicts over Israel’s invasions of Gaza and Lebanon, their embrace of identity politics and President Biden’s aborted candidacy.

In 2017, “everything felt bigger, more important,” said Krista Suh, a screenwriter in Los Angeles. When the Women’s March was announced for the day after Mr. Trump’s swearing-in, Ms. Suh, a novice knitter, came up with a pattern for a cat-eared pink cap to wear to the protest and posted it online.

Within days, “pussy hats” became a ubiquitous emblem of anti-Trump dissent.

Ms. Suh has stayed somewhat politically involved; she canvassed for Ms. Harris in Arizona. But she had no plans to protest this weekend.

“I feel like I’m just so much more jaded now,” she said.

‘He Won the Popular Vote’

When members of Lehigh Valley ROAR assembled once again in Ms. Morganelli’s living room this month, days before Mr. Trump would return to the White House, few were certain about what they should do next. They had canvassed and phone-banked for Ms. Harris. “You name it, we did it,” Ms. Morganelli said.

Ms. Wild had lost her seat, too.

In the corner of Ms. Morganelli’s living room, a cardboard cutout of Mr. Obama still wore a pink hat from the 2017 Women’s March, which most of the group members had attended. But none of them were going to Washington to protest Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

Some members had come to question the effectiveness of the Women’s March. Others were now more concerned about the safety of demonstrating. Last fall, one member’s car was broken into by someone who also tore up the Harris yard signs she had in the back seat.

Four years after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, Ms. Morganelli was ambivalent about the optics of protesting the outcome of a fair election.

“This time, he won the popular vote,” she said, referring to the president-elect. “As good Americans and good Democrats, you have to accept that, right?”

Instead of protest, the group planned to get together to drink wine and write thank-you notes to Mr. Biden. “Moving forward, all we can do is try to be our best selves as good citizens,” Ms. Morganelli wrote on the group’s Facebook page.

A Resistance With Some Regrets

In its early days, the opposition to Mr. Trump seemed to practically organize itself. Grieving liberals poured their energy into any vessel available. People who had never organized a protest in their lives were transformed into leaders of demonstrations of historic scale, sometimes overnight, as was the case for Naomi Lindquester.

Jolted by Mr. Trump’s election, Ms. Lindquester, then a 42-year-old elementary schoolteacher in Denver, created a Facebook event called Women’s March on Denver. She thought she would have to beg her friends to attend.

Instead, the day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 people arrived at the State Capitol to denounce the new president. It was likely the largest demonstration in the history of Colorado.

The Women’s March protests drew some 500,000 attendees to Washington and hundreds of thousands more rallied across the country. But the groups that materialized to organize them, often led by media-savvy young urban professionals, soon found themselves struggling to maintain momentum and, at times, infighting.

The national Women’s March organization splintered after one organizer accused others of antisemitism. Other groups disintegrated amid more prosaic conflicts over priorities and egos.

“It got really ugly, really fast,” said Ms. Lindquester, who has not spoken with her fellow organizers of the Denver march since they fell out in late 2018.

Many such groups, she believes, were victims of their sudden celebrity. “I’ll be really honest with you,” she said, “I very much enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame.”

Since November, Ms. Lindquester has found herself questioning the impact of the march she organized. “The fact that we did that ginormous march and he still got re-elected a second time?” she said.

She has mostly stepped back from public politics — a shift that was in part a result of her move from Denver to a small, conservative town elsewhere in the state, and the heightened scrutiny on teachers’ politics in recent years.

While she was proud of her role in the 2017 protest, “I don’t talk to anyone about that, because I will hear about it if I do,” she said.

In a Facebook post this month she suggested a list of actions that she argued would make a bigger difference now than marching: Plant trees. Volunteer in the community. “Engage with people who think differently than you and find your common ground.”

A New Message: ‘This Is Hard.’

Some argue that the energy is still out there, but the goals are different. Ezra Levin, the executive director of Indivisible, an organization he co-founded in 2017 to channel grass-roots opposition to Mr. Trump, said the group had registered more new local chapters since November than it had at any other point since 2017.

In a new blueprint for action released shortly after the election, Indivisible urged its members to focus not just on Mr. Trump and Congress but also on local elected officials — particularly Democrats in blue states that could serve as a bulwark for resisting Mr. Trump’s policies.

It conceded that “too often in Trump 1.0, we embraced the aesthetics of protests instead of using them as part of a strategy.”

“You shouldn’t start with a tactic,” Mr. Levin said. “You should start with a goal.”

In Ms. Morganelli’s living room, the Lehigh Valley ROAR members spoke of leaning on one another even more as some family members drifted away from their politics in recent years: children who had grown enamored with right-wing survivalism or opposition to vaccines during the coronavirus pandemic, or turned on Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris over their support for Israel.

“I lost my liberal, progressive son to Joe Rogan,” one said, as others nodded in sympathy.

They felt alienated from younger Democratic activists who seemed to see fighting Mr. Trump as a lesser priority than matters of ideological purity.

“If you’re not lefty-left enough, they are willing to sacrifice their vote and throw it away,” either by not voting or voting for a third-party candidate, said Lori McFarland, a member of the group who is now the chairwoman of the Lehigh County Democratic Committee. “And they’ve just set us back.”

Ms. Suh, the “pussy hat” creator, has not sought to reprise her role in the protest movement. She thought that a unifying phenomenon like her hat would still be possible — but the message should now be something different than the defiance of early 2017.

“I think,” she said, “it has to be something like: ‘I hear you. This is hard.’”

Politics

How will DeSantis, Youngkin and other 2028 hopefuls stay relevant outside the Trump administration?

Published

3 hours ago

January 19, 2025

Press Room

How will DeSantis, Youngkin and other 2028 hopefuls stay relevant outside the Trump administration?

During a busy week in the nation’s capital, far from the action, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had no trouble keeping his name in the political spotlight.

“This is a time for action. And a time for Washington, D.C., to deliver results to the American people. There are no more excuses for Republicans,” the conservative two-term governor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate said Thursday as he named Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody to succeed Sen. Marco Rubio in the Senate.

Two days earlier, President-elect Trump gave his onetime bitter GOP primary rival a shout-out after the governor called for a special state legislative session to implement Trump’s expected immigration crackdown.

“Thank you Ron, hopefully other governors will follow!” the president-elect said in a social media post.

VANCE IS THE EARLY FRONTRUNNER, BUT HERE ARE THE OTHER REPUBLICANS WHO MAY RUN FOR PRESIDENT IN 2028

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox listens before President-elect Trump talks at a meeting with Republican governors at Mar-a-Lago Jan. 9, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Due to the national profile he’s built over the past four years, the governor of one of the country’s most important states will likely continue to stay in the headlines as he takes a lead on some of the nation’s most consequential issues.

The spotlight should help DeSantis if he ends up launching a second straight GOP presidential nomination run in 2028, a race in which soon-to-be Vice President JD Vance will be considered the clear early frontrunner as the perceived America First and MAGA heir apparent to Trump.

“He needs to do what he did in 2022, which is pick good fights. And he’s shown a lot of capability to pick good fights with the left both in Florida and nationally,” longtime Republican strategist David Kochel said of DeSantis.

RNC CHAIR SAYS GOP HAS ‘DEEP BENCH’ FOR 2028

“I think he’ll be in demand to come do stuff in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina,” Kochel, a veteran of numerous GOP presidential campaigns, predicted, pointing to the three key early voting states in the Republican presidential primaries.

“I wouldn’t change a lot from how he did the run-up to his 2024 campaign. The problem was he basically ran against an incumbent president. He didn’t have the wrong playbook. He had the wrong cycle.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a news conference with emergency officials as a hurricane bears down on his state Oct. 9, 2024 (AP)

While the initial moves in the 2028 White House run will likely start in the coming months, including some early state visits, most Americans won’t be paying a lick of attention until after the 2026 midterms, when the next presidential campaign formally gets under way. And that’s when DeSantis will be wrapping up his second and final four-year term steering Florida, allowing him to concentrate 100% on a White House run if that’s in his cards.

But what about another high-profile Republican governor who likely has national ambitions in 2028?

HERE ARE THE DEMOCRATS WHO MAY RUN FOR THE WHITE HOUSE IN 2028

The Virginia Constitution doesn’t allow for incumbent governors to run for a second consecutive term, so Gov. Glenn Youngkin will be out of office in Richmond in a year.

Compared to DeSantis, who also enjoys large GOP majorities in his state legislature, which will allow him to continue to enact a conservative agenda, Virginia is a purple state where Democrats have a slight upper hand in the legislature.

“It might be a little tougher for Youngkin, a little tougher for him to find ways to stay in the news” after he leaves office in a year, Kochel suggested.

But, Younkin predicted, “You’re going to see me a lot.”

“We’ve got a very aggressive agenda for being governor in the last 14 months,” he said in a Fox News Digital interview in November. “But part of that agenda that I have is to make sure that we have [Lt. Gov.] Winsome Sears as our next governor. [Virginia Attorney General] Jason Miyares is back as our attorney general and a super lieutenant governor who we will pick at our primaries.”

Youngkin, who energized Republicans nationwide in 2021 as a first-time candidate who hailed from the party’s business wing, edged former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe to become the first GOP candidate in a dozen years to win a gubernatorial election in the one-time swing state that had trended toward the Democrats over the previous decade. He could also potentially end up in the Trump administration after his term in Richmond sunsets in a year.

“I told the president when I called him and told him that I wanted to finish my term that I would be available to help him at any time while I’m governor and afterwards,” Youngkin told Fox News Digital, referring to a call he held with Trump right after the November election.

But if he doesn’t enter the Trump administration, another route for Youngkin to stay in the spotlight in 2026 would be criss-crossing the country on behalf of fellow Republicans running in the midterm elections. It’s a role Youngkin previously played in 2022, helping fellow Republican governors and gubernatorial candidates.

“He’s got to do the blocking and tackling, go state by state, help a lot of candidates, raise a lot of money for them. Get a bunch of governors elected,” Kochel suggested. “That’s the playbook for him.”

What about NIkki Haley, the former two-term Republican governor of South Carolina and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in Trump’s first administration, who was the last rival standing against Trump in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries?

Nikki Haley speaks at the GOP convention

Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador and former South Carolina governor, speaks at the Republican National Convention July 17, 2024, in Milwaukee. (Fox News/Paul Steinhauser)

Out of office and shut out of the Trump world while still facing social media zingers by the president-elect, Haley’s ability to grab attention should she seek the presidency again may be a more difficult climb within a party once again on bended knee to the former and future president.

Haley does have a weekly national radio show on Sirius XM, where she noted a few weeks ago, “I had no interest in being in [Trump’s] Cabinet.”

But a lot can happen in the two years until the next White House race officially gets under way. There could be some buyer’s remorse among voters if the new administration is not successful in enacting some of its goals.

“While JD Vance starts as the presumed frontrunner right now, there’s a million miles to go between now and then,” seasoned Republican strategist Colin Reed told Fox News.

And Kochel added that for some Republicans mulling a 2028 presidential bid, “I think a little strategic distance is not a bad idea. Because you don’t know what’s going to happen over the next two years.”

CLICK TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

But holding statewide office — either as a governor or senator — doesn’t guarantee favorable coverage.

“Having a day job cuts both ways. It gives you a platform, a megaphone, and an ability to make news whenever you want. But it also carries with it the responsibilities of governing or legislating or being part of government bodies, whether it’s Congress or the state you are running, where things can go wrong and end up on your doorstep and become political baggage,” Reed noted.

Reed warned that “history is littered with those officeholders who ran and won for a second term only to have political baggage at home become political headaches on the campaign trail.”

Paul Steinhauser is a politics reporter based in New Hampshire.

Politics

Opinion: If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive, how would he have approached the Trump era?

Published

3 hours ago

January 19, 2025

Press Room

Opinion: If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive, how would he have approached the Trump era?

Unlike the many people who are upset that Donald Trump is being inaugurated on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I see it as a good thing. First, it calls even more attention to the day and its significance. Second, it is a chance to speculate about what King might say and do if he were alive in the Trump era.

Counterfactual, “what if” history is a trend in the literary world. Trump’s inauguration on the holiday may prompt us to think about what America and the world might have looked like with King alive and well. Conversely, how did America and the world devolve without him?

King was the kind of leader who comes along once in a lifetime, one with unmatched eloquence and passion. His gift for oratory could energize all kinds of people, including workers, presidents and other heads of state. He possessed visionary insight on the complex racial, social and economic ills as well as their solutions and consequences.

He worked tirelessly to build a grassroots civil rights and social justice movement and serve as its guiding force. And his charismatic presence influenced people to act on the issues and problems he was working to solve.

How might that play out in the Trump era? To begin with, King abhorred all violence. He most likely would have been deeply pained by the mass gun killings that have become somewhat commonplace in American cities. He would almost certainly have butted heads with the National Rifle Assn. and its ardent backer Trump while lobbying Congress to pass comprehensive gun control legislation.

When it comes to international politics, King surely would have condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine. One can also envision him speaking out against Hamas’ kidnapping and slaughter of Israelis as well as Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians. He would have called these wars ineffectual, repressive and wasteful, a drain on resources that should go to programs that aid the poor and minorities. On this point, he and Trump, who repeatedly claims he has kept America out of wasteful wars, would likely be in some agreement.

It’s impossible to imagine King not fighting tooth and nail against the rash of voter suppression laws and the GOP’s ploys to dilute Black and minority voting strength, including the assault on the Voting Rights Act. He’d bump heads with Trump on that. But Trump would also have a comeback: He’d cite the sharp increase in Black and Hispanic votes for him in the recent presidential election.

King would almost certainly try to prevent the country’s Republican-led rightward sprint, drawing negative attention from Trump and his MAGA coalition. But even he would not have been able to stop the many powerful forces with vested interest in halting or reversing the country’s momentum toward expanded civil rights, labor protections and economic fairness.

The resurgence of overtly racist sentiments, acts and conflicts under Trump would obviously trouble King, who famously hoped for a day when Americans are judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

King would have had to find new ways to challenge the continuing ills of poverty and wealth inequality, which ballooned in the decades after his death. Even given his superb organizing and planning skills, this growth likely would have been a losing battle.

Had he lived, King’s unshakable commitment to the cause of human rights and economic equality surely would not have diminished. Wherever there was a campaign, march, rally, lobbying effort or event that his presence could boost, it’s a safe bet that he’d have much to say and do. In the Trump era, there would be plenty to keep him busy.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s latest book is “Day 1 The Trump Reign.” His commentaries can be found at thehutchinsonreport.net.