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The Irony of the Martin Luther King National Holiday Being the Same Date as the Trump Inauguration

One Day Celebrates a Great Man, the Other Installs a Moron

William Spivey
4 min readJan 17, 2025
MLK Photow:Yoichi Okamoto, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, Donald Trump Photo-https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Donald_Trump_swearing_in_ceremony.jpg

The national holiday celebrating the life of Martin Luther King Jr. is always celebrated on the third Monday of January. The inauguration of an American president is held on January 20th every four years. Since MLK Day became a national holiday in 1986, the events have coincided twice: in 1997, when Bill Clinton was sworn in for his second term, and in 2013, for Barack Obama’s second term. Obama technically was sworn in on Sunday, January 20, 2013, in a small private ceremony as dictated by the Twentieth Amendment, but the public ceremony was held on Monday, January 21, 2013, the same as MLK Day.

It’s safe to say that King and Trump had little in common, and the tone of the two events will be dissimilar. Donald Trump was 22 years old when MLK was assassinated. Trump was about to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania and begin work in the business owned by his father’s real estate business. Fred Trump owned racially segregated middle-class rental housing in New York City’s outer boroughs.

Martin Luther King, Jr. followed in the footsteps of his father, a minister. “Pappy” King was a civil rights activist once arrested for…

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William Spivey
William Spivey

Written by William Spivey

I write about politics, history, education, and race. Follow me at williamfspivey.com and support me at https://ko-fi.com/williamfspivey0680

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