Second Time. Definitely Not A Charm.

At around noon local time today, the felonious, misogynistic, racist, anti-immigrant, twice-impeached former game show host will swear his oath of office.

Photo by Maria Thalassinou on Unsplash

ALSO IN THIS POST…

• Billionaire wealth surged by $2 trillion last year

• Michael Smets, Professor of Management at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, on the DEI rollback

There’s no way around it so let’s start with the obvious.

It’s Monday, January 20, which means it’s inauguration day for America’s president-elect Donald Trump.

At around noon local time, the felonious, misogynistic, racist, anti-immigrant, twice-impeached, and very aggressive former game show host will swear his oath of office—an act that in so many ways puts America under his control yet again.

Those paying attention will know that today is also the day we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. In other words, two powerful men will be honored and celebrated: One, an activist who served as a prominent advocate for non-violent protest during the Civil Rights Movement. The other, a strongman with a rich history of advocating for violence who once bragged that his pre-insurrection speech on Jan. 6, 2021, drew a bigger crowd than King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (he didn’t).

Irony? Sure. But also, just a weird quirk of the law.

As I wrote in a recent post for The Persistent, this might feel like a Trumpian attempt to eclipse another person’s moment of honor. It’s actually not.

The 20th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution dictates that “the terms of the President and the Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January.” Meanwhile, the federal holiday honoring Dr. King, first observed in 1986, takes place on the third Monday of January every year—a date that always falls close to the activist’s January 15 birthday.

In the more than eight decades since the 20th Amendment established that inauguration date, nine presidents have assumed office, of which two did so on MLK day. (One was Bill Clinton in 1997; the other was Barack Obama in 2013.)

For many Americans, Monday might feel like a heavy day. Personally, I’ll be torn between a desire to look away as Trump’s swearing in is broadcast around the world, and a desire to glue my eyes to the television as history yet again unfolds in all of its unapologetic glory.

One thing that has given me some comfort, is an interview that Bernice King, the youngest child of King, gave to The Independent in November. No, she said, of course she didn’t want Trump to clinch another presidential election victory, but the date of his inauguration? Well that might actually be a small win, she told the paper.

“I’m glad that if it was going to happen, it happened on the King holiday, because Dr King is still speaking to us,” she said. “We cannot retreat or recoil,” she said. “We have to commit ourselves to continuing the mission of protecting freedom, justice and democracy in the spirit of my father.” She’s treating the inauguration as a call to action, she explained, an opportunity to reiterate her and her fellow activists’ commitment to the values for which her father fought so tirelessly: civil liberties for all.

Nonetheless, we all have a right to decide what we need to do on Monday.

Do we watch as Trump recites his oath of office for a second time? Do we catch a basketball game? Do we spend the day reading about the legacy of Dr. King? Or might we educate ourselves on the lesser-known women who worked with King, including those who inspired his most famous speech?

For what it’s worth, Michelle Obama won’t be attending the inauguration. No reason was given for why she’ll skip it, but she also owes no explanation.

Still, those looking for one may find answers in something she said in 2023, regarding Trump’s 2017 inauguration. “To sit on that stage and watch the opposite of what we represented on display, there was no diversity, there was no color on that stage," Obama said on her podcast. "There was no reflection of the broader sense of America. Many people took pictures of me and they're like, you weren't in a good mood. No, I was not."

Let’s see if this year it’ll look any different. I’m not holding my breath.

The above essay is adapted from a post first published on The Persistent, a digital journalism platform committed to amplifying women's voices, stories, ideas, and perspectives. Subscribe here if you don’t already. I think you’ll love it.

Party in the Alps

Photo by Evangeline Shaw on Unsplash

From one braggadocios man to a few hundred others.

Monday also marks the beginning of the World Economic Forum, an annual gathering of world leaders and wealthy business people, hosted in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.

The meeting, first held in 1971, has long served as an impetus for economic justice advocates to call out corporate-driven inequality and greed, and the extent to which global wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few.

This year is no exception.

According to a report by Oxfam, the combined wealth of the world’s richest individuals surged by $2 trillion last year—that’s three times faster than in 2023. Oxfam found that a total of 204 new billionaires were minted in 2024. In the U.S. alone—where wealth concentration is particularly high—the net worth of billionaires billowed by about $3.9 billion on average each day last year and 74 new billionaires emerged.

“The capture of our global economy by a privileged few has reached heights once considered unimaginable,” said Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar. “The failure to stop billionaires is now spawning soon-to-be trillionaires. Not only has the rate of billionaire wealth accumulation accelerated—by three times—but so too has their power,” he added.

Oxfam noted that the power of billionaires will be on particular display not just at the Davos WEF this week but also—of course—in Washington D.C.

According to Oxfam, Trump’s team will be the richest ever to run the U.S. government, worth more than an estimated $450 billion. So far, at least 13 billionaires have been appointed to jobs in his administration, Oxfam concluded, and even excluding Elon Musk, who reportedly spent over a quarter of a billion dollars to help Trump win November's election, the cabinet would be the richest in history.

Musk, currently has an estimated net worth of around $427 billion, making him the richest individual on the planet, followed by Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos, at around $237 billion, and Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, at around $211 billion. All three are expected to be at Trump’s inauguration later today.

According to Forbes, Trump’s net worth grew from about $2.5 billion to an estimated $6.1 billion during the course of 2024, thanks in part to his majority stake in Truth Social’s parent company.

“We present this report as a stark wake up-call that ordinary people the world over are being crushed by the enormous wealth of a tiny few,” Behar said.

Oxfam’s research also found that more than a third of billionaire wealth is now inherited. Last year, a report by investment bank UBS about the super-rich, found that over the previous decade, multigenerational billionaires had inherited a total of $1.3 trillion.

“The ultra-rich like to tell us that getting rich takes skill, grit and hard work. But the truth is most wealth is taken, not made,” said Behar. “So many of the so-called ‘self-made’ are actually heirs to vast fortunes, handed down through generations of unearned privilege.”

You can read more about this in an article I wrote that’s just been published on Forbes.

A Social License to Operate

Finally this week, I can’t not mention the ongoing war on DEI. I mean,

Last week I wrote a piece for The Persistent about how DEI is being blamed for so many disparate things. Most recently: The scale and damage of the LA wildfires.

I’ve been pondering this topic for a long time. Last year I wrote about the backlash to certain diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for the BBC, but it’s still something that deserves more airwaves, more attention, more oxygen—because it’s terrifying and only getting worse.

So I asked Michael Smets for his thoughts. Michael is a Professor of Management at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School. He and I have had many really valuable and enlightening conversations over the years about leadership and the culture of business. I particularly appreciate his way of connecting the dots: of understanding how something happening somewhere is entirely related with what’s going on elsewhere.

Here’s what he shared with me last week:

“Previously, there was societal pressure—and possibly even political coercion via quotas—to increase the number of women and other minorities in senior leadership positions. In the U.S., almost overnight, this societal pressure has gone away and practically been turned on its head— just listen to Pete Hegseth in the Senate arguing that moms have no place in the military and the forces would "rejoice" if DEI went away. That means the pressure to comply with societal pressure has gone away. It also clearly indicates that many DEI initiatives to date were driven by compliance, or just doing what is necessary to be legitimate, rather than "commitment" to the belief in the business value of DEI.

“A more nuanced but possibly even more disheartening reading may be that companies did believe in the business value of DEI but now perceive that the social cost of maintaining DEI initiatives is more costly than the value generated by a more diverse workforce. Anti-woke investment funds, calls for boycotts, and general pressure in the court of public opinion are just some examples of those costs.

“The DEI rollbacks are an incredibly painful reminder of the organizational need for legitimacy or a "social license to operate". If organizations were all about optimizing performance by the most rational means available, then the evidence would suggest that organizations should maintain their DEI programs. However, senior executives seem to expect that the commercial value generated by better decisions made by more diverse teams is more than offset by the social cost of being seen as an "illegitimate" business whose practices do not align with society's values.”

That’s all from me for this week. I’ll be back in your inboxes February 3. If you’ve enjoyed reading this newsletter for free, I’d urge you to consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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Josie

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