By Trip Jennings

It is hard for me to think of a greater distillation of who we are as a nation and the moment we are living through than the fact that we honored Martin Luther King Jr. on the same day that we inaugurated Donald Trump to a second term as president.

One man dared hope this country could live into its ideals and paid for it with his life through self-sacrifice. The other preaches old hatreds and praises selfishness and foments fear.

I am reminded of a quote by the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

Kant penned the line in a 1784 essay around the time this country’s founding generation was conceiving of a new country.

The Constitution emerged out of this communal conceiving. It was constructed out of the same crooked timber as the men who codified it. The founding generation enshrined slavery in it through a clause that enabled the slave-owning states to count slaves as 3/5ths of a person to ensure they could pad their populations with fellow humans to receive as much money from the federal government as possible following every 10-year Census.

King wanted to fulfill the promise of Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence — “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” It is why the man and his vision remain inspiring nearly 60 years after he was assassinated. He spoke deeply to who we could become as a country.

It is a case of unfortunate timing for President Trump that his second inauguration fell on the same day the nation honored King.

Like Trump today, King divided the nation while he was alive. Like Trump, he survived assassination attempts (until he didn’t). Like Trump, he spoke in a way that galvanized many millions of people.

But King’s vision was radically different from Trump’s: He wanted to make sure African Americans had the same rights as their White peers to vote, to have access to housing and capital. In his final days, King helped coordinate a poor-people’s campaign that included low-income folk who were White, Hispanic, Indigenous and Asian American.

Trump, on the other hand, ran his third campaign for the presidency on White grievance and fear mongering that revolved around vulnerable Brown and LBTQA+ populations.

And it appears he will dismantle federal programs that were created to put more non-white people in positions of power and decision making to reflect the increasing diversity of our nation. Financially, he appears more interested in protecting the status quo, making the rich richer than giving a people a leg up.

To get a sense of a second Trump administration, I listened to President Trump’s inauguration speech Monday.

According to his own words, he is going to cut prices, bring back manufacturing, round up millions of undocumented immigrants, create a new department of external revenue to collect tariffs, change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, eliminate “race” in our country as a category and make the U.S. a “color-blind society.”

He also will restore the greatness of the United States such that its magnificence will stop all wars.

That’s a lot to get done in four years as a president.

As for ending all wars, the language was familiar. As a Southerner raised on reading the Bible, this is language the Hebrew prophets used to speak of Yahweh in the Tanakh, the three main sections of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament in the Christian tradition), when they were dreaming of a day when Yahweh would remove all their troubles and create a golden age where worry and concern evaporated.

I don’t think Trump realized in the coming golden age he promised to Americans that he sounded like ancient Hebrew prophets describing God. But I noticed. And it gave me pause.

I haven’t lost faith that we can find that country Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of one day. I grew up learning the stories of fearless people in the Deep South like King and many countless others who thought in generations, not in social media news cycles.

They knew better than many Americans how this nation was built out of crooked timber of human beings. And that the work of making a more perfect union is never finished.

Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut where he reported on many stories, including the resignation and incarceration of Connecticut’s then-governor, John Rowland, and gang warfare in California. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet that produces investigative, data-rich stories with an eye on solutions that can be a catalyst for change.