2026: MLK Beloved Community and Trump’s America

In order for us to move on, Americans have to admit they got this one election very wrong. We were taken advantage of; we were conned. We have been conned as a nation by a conman who happens to be a billionaire, propped up by billionaires like Peter Thiel (gay) and Scott Bessent (gay), and legitimized by figures like Caitlyn Jenner (trans) —gay and trans people willing to excuse attacks on gay and trans rights so long as the checks cleared. They didn’t need policy to support him; they were driven by greed and egos. This is the state of our society: people willing to sell out just so they’re in the good graces of a man who cares only for himself.

Different groups were deceived in different ways, but the result was the same:

• Christians were conned into believing that Trump cared about their beliefs, ignoring the fruit of his life for the sake of political proximity.

• The working class was conned into believing that he, a billionaire known for getting over on contractors, cared anything about helping them achieve the American Dream.

• Young families were conned into believing that he cared about the future of their children, even as his policies strip away the social safety nets that would protect them.

• People obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein and his files were conned into believing Trump would release those files and expose himself, when, as he said to Marjorie Taylor Greene, “my friends will get hurt.”

  
  

Trump did not win by offering solutions about how to make all of our lives better. He catered to the angry, those fearful of change, misguided religious zealots and… the rich. Trump won by making us fear: Immigrants, Transgender people, Haitians “eating dogs,” and DEI (Black people). Even the soaring price of eggs became a political weapon.

What followed was not relief, but consequence. We moved from fear of the imaginary and preposterous to real mass layoffs, from cheap eggs to soaring prices everywhere else, and from promises of prosperity to rising debt for both consumers and the nation. The gap between the wealthy and the poor continues to widen, with the wealthy adding significantly to their wealth. No one asks the question: how do America’s billionaires get richer while the nation gets poorer? Their wealth is coming at the expense of the working poor, the middle class, and a nation slowly being bled dry.

This is not just a story about an election and what followed. It is a story about fear, money, power, and the moral choices we made—and what those choices have produced. But we’re not dead, so that means there’s still hope…

Ultimately, we face a choice between the calculated cruelty of our current path and the radical, interdependent promise of Dr. King’s “Beloved Community”—a blueprint for justice that requires us to dismantle the flourishing "Three Evils" of Racism, Militarism, and Materialism.

State Power and the Influence of Wealth

We now have a Supreme Court shaped by billionaire money. Clarence Thomas was funded by Harlan Crow; Samuel Alito by Paul Singer. The entire bench was vetted through a Federalist Society bankrolled by billionaires. When they sit in judgment on cases that protect wealth, deregulation, and corporate power, it isn’t impartial law; it’s loyalty to the billionaire class wearing a robe.

In September 2025, the Supreme Court (6-3 vote) allowed ICE agents to consider race, ethnicity, Spanish language usage, and appearance as factors for investigative stops in immigration enforcement. The ruling stayed a lower court order that had blocked these actions, allowing agents to use “apparent ethnicity” as a “relevant factor.” This is racial profiling sanctioned by empire. We have been set back.

This administration takes your money and redirects it to corporations and the wealthy—many of whom pay little to nothing in federal income taxes—while programs like SNAP and Medicare are left on life support. Corporations like Amazon, Chevron, and Netflix have reported massive profits in years where they paid zero in federal income taxes. Billionaires and their heirs—the Waltons, private equity executives, hedge fund managers—routinely pay lower effective tax rates than the people who work for them. Literally using taxpayer dollars to benefit the few.

Let me restate: This administration takes your money and redirects it to corporations and the wealthy—many of whom pay little to nothing in federal income taxes—while programs like SNAP and Medicare are left on life support.

Meanwhile, cities are under siege—literal war zones—by Trump’s personal army: ICE. They have historic funding to carry out the vendetta of a man scorned by his loss in 2020, deploying forces primarily where he is unpopular. I recently learned ICE has a $100 million recruiting budget. What’s even more stark is where they are recruiting: UFC fights, NASCAR events, and gun shows—spaces where white men are overwhelmingly overrepresented.

While deportations were sold as targeting violent criminals, children are pulled from homes and classrooms instead. People of color are stopped and asked to prove they belong here; we see the past in the present—men stopping people of color asking about their papers.

A Christian Perspective: The Cost of Discipleship

As a kid, I always wondered why Jesus could be so cruel with this: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, only those who do the will of my Father in heaven.” He goes on to say that prophesying, driving out demons, and performing miracles in His name is not enough; these people will be met with the devastating words, “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers.”

He then provides the standard for what it means to truly be a follower: “If you want to really follow me, you must deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me. For whoever will save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” In the context of the Roman world, the cross was not a metaphor for a small inconvenience; it was a tool of execution. Therefore, the phrase “take up your cross” means being willing to lose everything voluntarily. It is not a burden the world places on you, but a deliberate act of self-denial.

Here is the connection I want to make for my fellow Christians who voted for Trump. We have to be honest about why we voted for him and how we fundamentally failed this test of self-denial. We saw him as a vehicle to satisfy our fears, to reinforce our prejudices, and to scapegoat our hate. We feared Black and brown people coming into positions of power and influence; we feared an America that was no longer white; we held onto deep-seated prejudices regarding homosexuality and trans people, or our hate for the idea of abortion. We knew he was not a good man—maybe even a wicked man—but we decided that meant nothing because we believed he would bring this nation “back” to God, back to white, and back to what we considered “right.”

The truth is we knew better. God has never used a wicked person who, without shame, displays a total lack of morals daily through social media, his words, his actions, and his executive orders. But we could not deny ourselves. We could not deny ourselves our fears, our prejudices, and our hatreds, so we did something even more dangerous: we disguised them as "Christian values" and morality and checked the box for Trump.

Not voting for Trump would have benefited more people, but that sacrifice was beyond us because it required us to surrender our claim to comfort, status, and control. We thought we were taking the moral high ground with our vote, but what we were really doing was satisfying our ego and remaining intentionally insensitive to the plight of the masses.

Now, the fruit of that refusal to deny ourselves is visible: we see ICE brutalizing communities and harassing people of color. We see the past in the present—men stopping people of color to ask for “their papers.”

We see DEI—a tool meant to level the playing field for minorities, women, and the disabled—stripped away specifically for Black people, while Black unemployment sits near double the white rate at 7.5% versus 3.8%. This exposes the lie that “opportunity for all” ever really existed.

We are now overwhelmed by a leader with a massive ego who cares only for himself and is very clearly the opposite of Jesus Christ.

The America We Should Aspire To: The Beloved Community

We have just observed and celebrated the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. As is custom, people who only know MLK in the context of the March on Washington and the “I Have a Dream” speech often misquote him, mostly out of context, focusing on the “content of character” and not the “color of skin” portion.

We’ve already discussed “Trump’s America,” but I want to focus on what we should be working toward. MLK called it the “Beloved Community,” which is aspirational, hopeful, far-fetched, yet seemingly attainable. It predates the “I Have a Dream” speech.

Later in his life, he would call on us to fight against the three evils that prevent progress toward it: racism, militarism, and materialism (economic exploitation). We will take a look at those later. It came after the “I Have a Dream” speech.

I first want to explore the tenets of the Beloved Community in the context of Trump’s America. It was the spark for MLK’s call for non-violent change. It is built on love—more specifically agape love—a moral commitment to the well-being of others, including people with whom we disagree.

The Tenets of the Beloved Community:

• Justice, not harmony: Injustice must be confronted, exposed, and corrected. Reconciliation is only possible after systems of oppression are dismantled.

  
  

  This principle was embodied by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established in 1995 and chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The TRC was created to uncover the truth about apartheid-era human rights violations committed between 1960 and 1994. It offered amnesty to perpetrators who fully confessed to politically motivated crimes, choosing national healing through truth over criminal prosecutions built on silence. There was no reconciliation without reckoning.

  
  

  Today, we face a government that would rather we forget the horrors of our own history of racism and oppression, even reviving mechanisms that mirror those horrors. The sitting Vice President smugly says, “You don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” This is not a call to justice; it is an attempt to bypass accountability in favor of comfort. It is rhetoric designed to divide us and set us back.

  
  

• Nonviolence as a way of life: This tenet rejects domination, humiliation, and revenge, grounded in the belief that conflict can be resolved in ways that protect everyone’s humanity. Violence is not only physical harm; it is any attack on human dignity.

  
  

  Humiliation, then, is a form of violence. And it has become a posture of our government, best illustrated by white supremacy. It is a zero-sum game: only one can win. And not only must it win—it must humiliate. We see this logic in the language of the state. Our Department of Homeland Security insists on referring to immigrants as “aliens.”

  
  

  This week, the White House published a list of 345 “wins” from Trump’s first year in office; item #243 bragged about having “stripped notorious crackhead and grifter Hunter Biden of his taxpayer-funded Secret Service detail.” This is humiliation as policy and as sport. Feel how you want about Hunter Biden, but this is not about him. He is a private citizen being publicly degraded by a sitting president and his administration.

  
  

  The target may change—immigrants one day, political enemies the next—but the method remains the same: domination through shame. This stands in direct contradiction to Dr. King’s vision of nonviolence and the Beloved Community, which rejects humiliation as a tool of power and insists on protecting human dignity, even in conflict.

  
  

• Interdependence: We are all bound together in what Dr. King called a “single garment of destiny.” The suffering of the poor, the marginalized, the extravagance of the ultra-rich, the apathy of the voting public, and the suffering of people abroad are not separate from the moral health of the nation. This interdependence must be acknowledged and acted upon.

  
  

  Simply put: everyone matters.

  
  

  Yet we measure the health of our economy in ways that deny this truth. We point to the stock market and unemployment rates while forgetting that most people do not own stock and that unemployment does not account for whether work is livable. People work 40 hours a week and still cannot afford to live.

  
  

  Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor and U.S. Senator from Louisiana, once said that if infant mortality statistics were “corrected for race”—meaning Black women were removed—the numbers would not look so bad. He exposed his heart. And in doing so, he exposed a system that treats certain lives as disposable. I will let you interpret what that says about how Black lives are valued by Senator Cassidy and others like him.

  
  

  This is the opposite of interdependence. It is the refusal to see another person’s suffering as connected to our own.

  
  

• Economic Justice: A Beloved Community cannot exist alongside extreme wealth inequality and abject poverty. Access to affordable housing, healthcare, education, and gainful employment are not policy preferences; they are moral requirements.

  
  

  As unemployment rises, food becomes more expensive, and healthcare premiums increase for everyone—not just those on the ACA—billionaires live on super-yachts the size of floating cities, complete with pools, helipads, and multiple decks. Jeff Bezos owns one. Elon Musk is being positioned to become the world’s first trillionaire, after famously giving Trump $250 million to help secure the presidency.

  
  

  Jeffrey Epstein purchased a private island where horrors were committed alongside other wealthy and powerful figures against underage girls. Money did not merely buy luxury; it bought silence, protection, and access. When this much money sits in so few hands, it becomes about who gets protected and who gets ignored. This isn’t wealth. It’s untouchability.

  
  

  These are not the Rockefellers or Carnegies of a previous era. They show little interest in the public good, only in enriching themselves and their political enablers. This is not economic success. It is moral (and policy) failure. Tax the rich their fair share.

  
  

• Global Scope: King understood the Beloved Community as international. War, colonialism, and global exploitation were incompatible with it. Peace abroad and justice at home were inseparable.

  
  

  Every American should know the story of the My Lai massacre and the U.S. government’s attempt to cover it up. Hundreds of civilians were killed. Women were raped. Villages were burned. Cover-Up, available on Netflix, documents this history. It stands as a warning of what happens when power is placed above human life and when violence is excused in the name of "national interest."

  
  

  Today, we again see a government invading a sovereign nation to extract its resources. That is colonialism. On January 3, 2026, under “Operation Southern Spear,” the administration captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife and transported them to New York to face federal charges. Trump publicly announced that Venezuelan oil would be sent to the United States and later bragged about receiving between 30 and 50 million barrels, valuing the seizure at roughly $4 billion. He repeatedly argued that Venezuela should return land and oil rights to the U.S., claiming, “They took our oil away from us.” Under a January 9 Executive Order, the proceeds from this oil are held in U.S. Treasury accounts, shielded from international creditors and, as Trump stated, “controlled by me, as President,” bypassing standard Treasury oversight. This is not justice. It is power without accountability.

  
  

  At the same time, governments around the world have done little as Israel continues killing thousands of civilians in Gaza, even in the face of a so-called ceasefire. Once again, innocent lives are treated as collateral, and once again the most powerful nations on earth refuse to intervene in any meaningful way. The silence of the G7 is not neutrality; it is permission.

  
  

  These are not separate events. They reveal the same moral failure: a world order willing to sacrifice human life for dominance, security, and profit. This is what it looks like when peace abroad is severed from justice at home. It reveals how far we remain from King’s global vision of the Beloved Community.

  
  

The Three Evils in Full Flourish in Trump’s America

Dr. King understood that America could never become the Beloved Community while three forces remained strong: Racism, Militarism, and Materialism (economic exploitation). These were not abstract ideas. They were systems of power that distort human dignity and turn fear into policy.

In Trump’s America, all three evils are no longer hidden. They are embraced, funded, and defended.

1. Racism (Rooted in White Supremacy)

Racism is as American as apple pie. It is the belief that nothing is better and nothing can stand beside whiteness. It refused others their right to live, as we saw with Native Americans. It denies people their rights to equality, dignity, and the chance to flourish.

Racism rooted in white supremacy is the belief in a racial hierarchy that devalues every race except white and distorts the moral fabric of society. That distortion matters because it breeds envy and turns into violence. It promises white people a certain future not because they work hard, or are disciplined, or educated, but simply because they are white.

So when people who are not white succeed beyond what some believe is “their station”—in jobs, wealth, or influence—the conclusion is that the system must be rigged.

What comes next has followed the same pattern throughout history: cities burned, people of color murdered, and no one held accountable. Today, the newest scapegoat is DEI.

We now live in a moment where excellence itself is questioned if it comes from the “wrong” people.

Consider General Charles Q. Brown Jr.

He is a four-star general. A fighter pilot with more than 3,000 flight hours. Former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His career spans decades of command, combat, and service to this country.

Yet he was removed by Pete Hegseth, a political appointee with no comparable command experience, who questioned Brown’s promotion and cited his supposed focus on “DEI programs” as justification. Let that sink in. One of the most accomplished military leaders in modern American history was not dismissed for failure, incompetence, or corruption, but because his excellence was reframed as political.

This is how racism now operates. Not by openly declaring Black leaders unqualified, but by suggesting their qualifications are suspicious. Not by denying achievement outright, but by explaining it away. I cannot imagine stepping onto a plane, seeing a Black pilot, and assuming he is there not because he is qualified, but because of DEI. That way of thinking does not protect excellence; it poisons it.

Racism makes us smaller. It makes us dumber. It divides us and assigns worth based on skin instead of truth. And when worth is distorted, violence and rage are never far behind.

2. Militarism

Militarism is the reliance on violence and war as tools of policy. It dehumanizes people both abroad and at home. King lived through American militarism in Vietnam. We are living through it now.

Trump has equipped ICE with a budget larger than any other law enforcement agency and deployed it as a domestic force against cities led by political opponents. What we are witnessing is not public safety. It is state power used to intimidate.

This January in Minneapolis, American citizens were killed by federal agents operating under the banner of “immigration enforcement.” On January 7, Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was fatally shot by an ICE agent while in her vehicle during a massive federal operation. Video and eyewitness accounts cast serious doubt on official claims that she posed a threat, and her death has been ruled a homicide by the county medical examiner.

Just weeks later, on January 24, federal agents shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old VA ICU nurse and caregiver, as he filmed and attempted to assist others during a protest against ICE activity. Multiple video sources show Pretti holding only a phone and trying to help a woman being pushed, contradicting early government claims that he was a violent threat.

In both cases, the initial government narrative sought to frame these victims as dangerous or criminal—even labeling them “domestic terrorists”—despite video evidence suggesting they were not an imminent threat when killed.

U.S. citizens have been detained because of their accents. Doors have been rammed in. People have been taken from their homes in their underwear. This is not law enforcement. It is punishment as spectacle. Militarism trains us to see neighbors as threats and uniforms as unquestionable authority. It teaches us to accept cruelty as necessary. It replaces justice with fear. This is not how a free society functions; this is how authoritarian states justify bloody power.

This is a cruel administration driven by revenge and brutality—an America marching toward hell with gasoline drawls.

3. Materialism (Economic Exploitation)

Materialism prioritizes profit and consumption over people. It produces poverty, inequality, and indifference to suffering. We were sold a dream called the “American Dream.” It turned out to be snake oil. No—it turned out to be greed, self-centeredness, and distraction.

Greed

Greed is the fixation on making money in order to obtain stuff: the popularity of Real Housewives, the Kardashians, the endless pursuit of things that never satisfy and always leave us empty. How many stories have we heard of people working their entire lives for a company only to be discarded when they became sick, old, or inconvenient?

Self-centeredness and the absence of empathy

I believe America is in moral decline because of this more than anything else. We have lost our heart. We do not care that American children go without food, so we refuse to pay for free lunches because we see them as “their children” instead of "our children." The same is true of healthcare. We do not see all Americans as our countrymen, so people walk around afraid to get sick, knowing that one illness could financially destroy them. If we do not change, this way of thinking will lead to our downfall.

Distraction

Distraction is the final fruit of billionaire capitalism. We work too much, and it steals us from family, friends, and community. Social media is designed to be addictive. Phones and tablets—especially for younger humans—are literally a drug high. Gambling on your phone is now legal. All of these distractions are pushed by the billionaires who profit from them and protected by politicians who refuse to regulate them. The United States has weaker regulation of social media and online gambling than many other countries because corporations are treated as people—meaning they can spend unlimited amounts of money to influence politicians. I think that is corrupt.

Closing Framework

The Beloved Community is a vision for the future.

“I Have a Dream” is a beautiful invitation to move toward that vision.

The three evils are the reality of why we cannot achieve this vision.

The Only Resistance Left: Choosing the Beloved Community

So, what do we do with all of this?

I’ve laid out the reality: as Americans, we are up against endless money, an ego-driven and vengeful president, and a government willing to nurture the three evils of racism, militarism, and materialism. We cannot outspend this system. We cannot out-shout it. And we cannot simply wait for it to collapse under the weight of its own cruelty.

The answer is simple, but it is not easy: we must choose the Beloved Community.

• Not as a slogan.

• Not as a theory.

• But as a way of living.

  
  

The Beloved Community is both the destination and the method. It is how we cancel out the three evils and refuse to let them shape who we become. To break the spell of the "con," we must do the one thing the architects of fear hate most: we must connect.

• Go volunteer. Fill the gaps where the state has withdrawn its care.

• Join something that has nothing to do with politics. Relearn how to be a neighbor before you are a partisan.

• Sit with people who don’t look like you.

• Listen to people you don’t agree with.

  
  

This Is Not Retreat—This Is Resistance

Simply: build community. Encourage others to do the same. In these spaces, you will meet people who were conned. You will meet people who are waking up. And you will meet those who were jolted awake by the sight of ICE in their cities, by rising energy costs, and by the soaring grocery prices that were once used as a weapon of fear but are now a daily burden.

This is the work. It is the refusal to be segregated by hate or silenced by wealth. The future of this country will not be decided only in Supreme Court chambers, in overseas oil deals, or by the whims of billionaires. It will be decided in neighborhoods, in churches, in classrooms, and around kitchen tables.

This is our America.

We get to determine its future—not the rich and demented.

As always, Stay Vigilant and Stay Woke.

Further Reading and Exploration

If you would like to explore the themes discussed in this essay more deeply, consider the following books, documents, and historical records:

The Vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

• "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?" (1967) by Martin Luther King Jr. – This is Dr. King's final book, where he extensively outlines the "Three Evils" of Racism, Militarism, and Materialism.

  
  

• "The Trumpet of Conscience" (1967) by Martin Luther King Jr. – A collection of lectures that explores the interdependence of global justice and the necessity of nonviolence.

  
  

• The King Center (The Beloved Community) – For more on the specific tenets and the philosophy of nonviolence (Kingian Nonviolence), visit thekingcenter.org.

The Influence of Wealth and State Power

• "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right" by Jane Mayer – A deep dive into how billionaire funding has reshaped the American judiciary and political landscape.

  
  

• The Federalist Society Records – Public archives regarding judicial vetting and the history of billionaire-backed legal movements.

• Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) – For data on corporate tax avoidance and the effective tax rates of the ultra-wealthy.

  
  

The History of Racial Profiling and Militarism

• "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" by Michelle Alexander – Essential reading for understanding how legal and enforcement systems are used to maintain racial hierarchies.

  
  

• Documentary: "Cover-Up" – Exploring the My Lai massacre and the systemic cover-up of war crimes (available on Netflix).

  
  

• ACLU Reports on ICE and Immigration Enforcement – Historical and current data on civil rights violations during domestic enforcement operations.

Faith and the Cost of Discipleship

• "The Cost of Discipleship" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer – A profound theological exploration of "cheap grace" versus "costly grace" and what it truly means to follow the path of self-denial.

  
  

• "God of the Oppressed" by James H. Cone – The foundation of Black Liberation Theology, connecting the message of Jesus directly to the plight of the marginalized.

  
  

Economic Justice and Global Scope

• "The Price of Inequality" by Joseph E. Stiglitz – A Nobel Prize-winning economist’s look at how wealth inequality endangers our future.

  
  

• South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Archives – For an in-depth look at the process of national healing through truth, available through the Saha.org.za archives.

Key Data Point for Comparison

To help visualize the "Interdependence" section regarding the economic gap, consider the current unemployment trends: