U.S. President Donald Trump at a memorial for conservative activist Charlie Kirk, on Sept. 21. After Kirk's death, Trump vowed to crack down on left-wing groups.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/The Associated Press
More than three centuries ago, the Parliament of England passed a law whose principles remain a foundation for government in Britain, Canada, the Commonwealth – and the United States.
King James II tried to rule as an absolute monarch, but the 1689 Bill of Rights put an end to that. It declared “that levying money for or to the use of the Crown … without grant of Parliament … is illegal.” Also illegal: “The pretended power of dispensing with laws or the execution of laws by regal authority.”
Parliament deposed James II, and the new monarch, William of Orange, accepted that henceforth laws would be passed by Parliament and binding on the monarch, not the other way around, and that the power of the purse – the power to tax – would belong to Parliament, not the king. The result was limited, constitutional monarchy.
The Founding Fathers of the new United States were steeped in this history. Worried about the rise of tyranny – a future American president acting like an absolute monarch – they divided the powers of government between the legislative, executive and judicial branches. Following the model of the English Bill of Rights, Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution puts “all legislative powers” in the hands of Congress, and gives it “power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises.”
These principles, and the habits of mind flowing from them over the past 250 years, help to make America, America.
President Donald Trump is trying to bury them.
Legislative control over taxation? Mr. Trump is abusing emergency powers to tax most imports from most countries. If a quiescent Congress and an indulgent Supreme Court let him continue, Mr. Trump will have given the White House a source of cash independent of the legislature, worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year. A foundational principle of the American Revolution and the Glorious Revolution is being stood on its head.
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Some people in the MAGA world are fond of saying that the U.S. is “a republic, not a democracy.” There’s something to that, but it means the opposite of what they imagine. The Founding Fathers’ complex checks and balances aimed to create multiple centres of political power. This would prevent the emergence of a tyrannical democracy, where a president tries to rule without limits. Mr. Trump appears to be aiming for that.
Just as the 1689 Bill of Rights enshrined freedom of speech in Parliament, the First Amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights says that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
Yet last week, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel was yanked off the air by the ABC network, after Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr publicly called for his removal. Mr. Trump urged the firing of other talk shows hosts who make fun of him – “That leaves Jimmy [Fallon] and Seth [Myers], two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!” he wrote on social media. He also said of broadcasters who don’t give him positive coverage that “maybe their licence should be taken away.”
ABC announced Monday that it will reinstate Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show in the wake of criticism over his comments about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
The Associated Press
In the wake of the killing of MAGA icon Charlie Kirk, the administration offered signs that the tragedy would be a pretext to try to shut down dissent. Lickspittle Attorney-General Pam Bondi said that she would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
Asked by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl what Ms. Bondi was talking about – even hateful words are protected by the U.S. First Amendment, as are TV jokes about Mr. Kirk and Mr. Trump – the President told Mr. Karl that “she’d probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly.” He added: “It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart.”
On Sunday, in his latest example of treating the Justice Department as an enabler of his wishes, he posted on social media that Ms. Bondi should prosecute former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney-General Letitia James and Senator Adam Schiff, who were all involved in past investigations or prosecutions of Mr. Trump.
This merely scratches the surface of what the Trump administration has been doing to American legal and constitutional norms. From bidding to run monetary policy out of the White House by taking over the Federal Reserve, to telling states to gerrymander their electoral maps in advance of the 2026 midterm elections, the President is trying to turn himself into the font of all power.
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For Canadians, our focus these past few months has been Mr. Trump’s pursuit of tariffs, and the damage that 1930s-level trade barriers could do to a Canadian economy designed around integration with the U.S. But we can survive even very high American tariff walls. They could knock a couple of percentage points off Canadian gross domestic product but, however painful that is, it’s survivable.
The greater threat is that our neighbour, the most powerful country on earth, is going to devolve into a kind of autocracy.
Louis XIV famously said, “L’état c’est moi” – I am the state. I am the law. He was an absolute monarch.
The U.S. Constitution is about preventing such a form of government. Will it?