We’d Never Had a King Until This Week

I grew up in the town of Lexington, Massachusetts, the self-styled “birthplace of American liberty,” and my first summer job was giving tours of the Battle Green. I would plunk my tricorne hat atop my head and meet the incoming waves of visitors, herding them around the Common and telling them the story of the April morning in 1775 when brave townspeople made their stand against the British and their king in the first fighting of the Revolution. Eight of those men died that day because they wished to rule themselves; as the Declaration of Independence put it the next summer, all men are equal, and that to secure the rights they are due “governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” By legend, John Hancock—a target of the British raid on Lexington—signed the document in script large enough that King George could read it “without his spectacles.”

Democratic self-rule was a novel construct at the time, and it appears it may be tending back toward novelty again. On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s official White House social-media account sent out a picture of him wearing a crown; as he proclaimed on his Truth Social page, “Long Live the King.” It is a mug’s game to respond to every trollish provocation that Trump provides, but this one can’t pass with the day’s news. If America has a founding idea, that idea is “no kings.” Since the colonists didn’t have one close at hand, they couldn’t dethrone him, but the new nation took pains to insure that a monarchy would never arise. George Washington, who could have been a king, set the tone by abdicating after two terms, a precedent followed by all his successors until F.D.R., under wartime exigency, broke it. But Congress, led by a unanimous Republican caucus, quickly adopted the Twenty-second Amendment to—in the words of the 1940 G.O.P. platform—“insure against the overthrow of our American system of government.” In the long history of our civil religion, an American President declaring that he was a king would have been roughly equivalent to the Pope cheerfully tweeting out the news that he was now the Antichrist.

Trump, though, has long flirted and teased with the idea that he might want more than two terms in office, and he has never been shy about regal imagery. Consider the famous photo that showed him with his wife and young son in Trump Tower. The boy was astride a giant stuffed lion, with toy limousines scattered on the floor beneath him; Trump himself sat on a gilded throne. But it’s in the early weeks of this second term that he seems to have fully embraced the concept that he rules instead of governs. He has been issuing diktats—the Gulf of Mexico has a new name of his choosing—and sending his regent, Elon Musk, out to usurp the spending power of the Congress. Last week, he proclaimed that “he who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” which might as well have been “L’état, c’est moi.” Wednesday’s declaration that he was indeed a king came attached to a ruling that New York could not control its own traffic laws, announcing an end to what has been by most accounts a highly successful Manhattan experiment with congestion pricing. That this violates every Republican notion about the rights of states and localities is no matter; Trump clearly considers himself the mayor of New York (easy to do, since he last week ordered the Justice Department to drop all charges against the current occupant of that office, though the charges could be refiled if Trump’s bidding isn’t done).

It’s not clear whether Trump’s fiat on congestion pricing will hold—like many weighty issues, it now rests with the courts. But it’s also not clear whether Trump will allow the judiciary to overrule him; in any event, the deeper question is whether Americans will let him get away with his self-coronation. On Monday, across the country, groups of people marked Presidents’ Day with demonstrations against his blitzkrieg—the one I attended, in the whistling cold of Middlebury, Vermont, featured several signs proclaiming “No Kings,” and one placard showing the entire Gettysburg Address with its insistence that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” underlined. Still, those protests were relatively small, and they must compete with an energized right wing, including an evangelical Christian vanguard that asserts that Trump rules by divine right. As his newly appointed leader of the White House Faith Office, Paula White-Cain, once put it, any Christian who didn’t vote for Trump would have to “answer to God,” a sentiment that seems to have worked its way into the President’s thinking after he survived an assassin’s bullet. Before the assassination attempt, he told the National Prayer Breakfast earlier this month, “I believed in God, but I feel, I feel much more strongly about it.”

Trump’s sense of his own royalty helps explain at least some of the bewildering changes of recent days. The United States appears to have abandoned its support of Ukraine, as its top foreign-policy officials scramble to the monarchy of Saudi Arabia to cut deals with the Russian tsar; kings favor other kings. In one of those ironies that history delights in, it’s the United Kingdom that has taken up the cause of Ukraine most vociferously, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer reiterating his support for Volodymyr Zelensky after Trump’s bizarre lie that Ukraine had “started” the war. Britain, with its tamed king, was one of the very few places where last year’s anti-incumbent tide swept committed democrats into power; Starmer’s Labour Party likely has four years left on its mandate, and it may well be a redoubt of the faith in the rule of law, not men. Perhaps the Trumpian example will convince at least a few others—polling in Canada, where the Tories fled after the Revolution, seems to show a drop in support for that country’s own demagogue in upcoming elections; Vice-President J. D. Vance’s shout-out to the far right in Germany may be backfiring as well.

But back home, who knows? This past election seemed to be a referendum more on the price of eggs than the price of freedom; one winces to recall Ben Franklin’s proclamation that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither.” (Also, the price of eggs is soaring.) My ancestors have been in this country since before the Revolution, Appalachian stock; I have spent my life imbued with that Lexingtonian sense that we want no king. But in our present moment I think that it’s likeliest to be recent immigrants who still viscerally crave the American promise of liberty; in so many cases, they came here to escape arbitrary rule. That many of them now hunker down in their homes against Trump’s raids doesn’t change the fact that they understand what America stands for. Or stood for. ♦