Donald Trump is making America a monarchy again

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David Moscrop is a writer and political commentator. He is the author of Too Dumb for Democracy and a Substack newsletter.

There once was hardly a more despicable word in the colonies that became America than “monarchy.”

Nearly two and a half centuries ago, revolutionaries in what would become the United States of America set out to decouple from Great Britain, taking issue with its hereditary and authoritarian system of governance that allowed the all-powerful King George III to rule from afar. Full of Enlightenment fervour, Thomas Jefferson, a self-declared “enemy” of the principles of monarchy, believed it to be a “poison”; writing to George Washington, Jefferson remarked “There is scarcely an evil known in these countries which may not be traced to their king as its source, nor a good which is not derived from the small fibres of republicanism existing among them.” And Thomas Paine, not mincing his words in his influential and inflaming pamphlet Common Sense, called monarchy “the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.”

Monarchy was so hated by many in the colonies – so convinced were they that Great Britain’s governance was unjustly trampling their freedoms – that they were willing to spill blood to oppose it. The country that emerged from that war was a republic, and its founding is marked by traumas from monarchy’s tyranny. America’s first president set a precedent – not in law, but in practice – of term limits for the head of the executive branch, because for Washington, presidents weren’t to be kings. When Col. Lewis Nicola, tired of Congress’s delays in backpay for the Continental Army, floated the notion of an American king in a letter, Washington firmly rebuked him: “If I am not deceived in the knowledge of myself, you could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable,” he replied.

But today, the U.S. has come a long way from George Washington and those early republicans. While executive overreach and concentration of power in the Oval Office has grown over the years, President Donald Trump has taken it to terrifying new heights, effectively governing by decree with Congress seemingly under his thumb. Just this week, he signed an executive order to put all independent agencies under his sole supervision by making the potentially illegal argument that the Constitution vests all executive power in the president (while claiming that this ensures “a government that answers to the people,” thus deciding that he is the avatar for all Americans). Mr. Trump’s talking about a third term, which is illegal under the 22nd Amendment, which made explicit Washington’s implicit check against autocracy, and he’s declined to endorse his vice-president JD Vance as his successor; it’s “too early” to say, according to the 78-year-old, who might well imagine himself appearing on the ballot again, regardless of the law – assuming there is a ballot at all. And on Wednesday, after intervening in New York City politics by cancelling congestion pricing, he even made his royal intents explicit on Truth Social: “Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”

Setting aside the fecklessness of the ostensible opposition, the Democratic Party, the separation of powers and the checks and balances the founding fathers built into fundamental American law may be ill-equipped to confront America’s transformation – or rather, its reversion. We are in an era of cult politics and the MAGA-fication of political life, where partisan identity and loyalty supersedes duty to the law. Legislative and judicial checks on the executive now appear to come second, if at all, to one’s deference to the president – or, rather, to the king.

And so, a revolution sparked in large part by the idea that monarchy was tyrannical, embodied by a clueless and domineering George III, has come full circle, in a grotesque sense. Mr. Trump is set to make America a monarchy again – an autocratic monarchy, not a constitutional one. A country that was in many ways founded on hatred for a supreme ruler has apparently decided it misses having a king.

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Donald Trump did not invent the idea of increasing the power of the presidency; the scope, strength and boldness of the executive branch has been growing for decades. Theodore Roosevelt worked to weaken Congress and empower the executive he led, as did Woodrow Wilson after him; Franklin Roosevelt leveraged the crises of the Great Depression and the Second World War to take presidential power further still – and was elected four times for his efforts, which precipitated the aforementioned 22nd amendment. And the use of executive orders as a governance tool has been on the rise in recent decades.

But this explicitly runs counter to the intentions of the founding fathers allegedly held in sacred regard by Americans. The second sentence of the Constitution declares that “all legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in” Congress – powers such as spending and borrowing money, controlling immigration and making war. The founders’ core idea was that Congress makes laws, and the president would execute them.

But if Congress was meant to be the ultimate law-making body, it is today comprised of courtiers, in a House and Senate that are equal parts snake-bitten and complicit, and where capital is derived from fealty to the president, rather than to the country. The Oval Office is doing an end-run around the legislative branch, and accusations of a full-on executive coup by the President were floating around even before his consigliere Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a meme come to terrifying life, started storming their way through the state. They’ve since gotten down to effectively unilateral work in hollowing out the government, upending or ending entire departments, firing thousands of bureaucrats, accessing data they ought to have no access to, and seizing the Treasury’s payments system while refusing to spend money that had been set out by Congress.

The courts are trying to do their constitutional part to uphold the rule of law and separation of powers, with lawsuits and injunctions filed to slow the fast-rolling executive train. But as The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal argues, the courts may be powerless to stop Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk. The judicial system doesn’t have its own military, after all. If the executive chooses to assert a power, who’s going to stop it – and how? It’s one thing to say “You cannot do this”; what if the President, or his “special government employee” Mr. Musk, go ahead and do it anyway?

What’s more, Mr. Trump’s royal council has already begun undermining the courts. In response to judicial rulings against the administration’s flurry of executive orders, his Vice-President wrongly declared that judges “aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” One imagines that Mr. Vance, a lawyer by trade, has a rather liberal definition of “legitimate,” just as one expects he may be laying the groundwork for the administration to ignore judicial rulings as violations. That would be a constitutional crisis – but one that’s been a long time coming.

The power of the president, who isn’t the only twig on the executive branch but is certainly the biggest, has been on the rise. Over the years, that’s made the whole of America’s democratic government a dry field on a hot, stormy day during which lightning threatens to strike; if it does, up go the flames.

With Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, lightning may be about to strike twice.

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There are, of course, reasons to empower the executive branch. States have grown more complex since the 18th century and, thus, so has the executive; as American historian Michael Klarman points out, the rise of administrative agencies under control of the executive reflects as much. A rather less compelling argument, on the other hand, comes from former president Richard Nixon saying, infamously, to journalist David Frost, “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal” – which is to say, the executive enjoys extraordinary and extrajudicial powers that it could exercise at its discretion because, well, it’s the executive, and things happen. And what a coincidence: Extraordinary presidential power is a position that the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed last year when it decided presidents have “absolute immunity” for actions central to the execution of the duties of their office, however those may be interpreted, along with at least a presumptive immunity for acts “within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities.”

Do we doubt for a moment that should push come to shove, that the courts wouldn’t interpret the range of such actions, within the core or perimeter, with latitude?

Either way, centralizing power in the executive branch has always been a risky bet. It relies on the hopes that never would the wrong person, hell-bent on abusing their executive power to the extreme, come along and occupy the Oval Office. That order also presumes deference to the rule of law.

On Feb. 10, the American Bar Association’s president, William R. Bay, issued an extraordinary statement warning that the U.S. was seeing something beyond the routine change that comes with the transition from one administration to the next. “Instead,” Mr. Bay wrote, “we see wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself, such as attacks on constitutionally protected birthright citizenship, the dismantling of USAID and the attempts to criminalize those who support lawful programs to eliminate bias and enhance diversity” as well as “attempts at wholesale dismantling of departments and entities created by Congress without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law.”

What Mr. Bay is describing is an executive coup, the stuff of would-be absolutist monarchs – what we would today call a dictator. And Mr. Trump appears to have internalized what the trends of U.S. politics and jurisprudence have led to: If the president thinks it is good, that means it is not illegal. Just last weekend, in an ominous social-media message, he posted a quote often attributed to the (in)famously imperial Napoleon Bonaparte: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

James Wilson, an American founding father who did more than perhaps any other man to shape the executive branch, wanted a president that had sole authority over the executive branch. That ran contrary to those who were wary of the threat of the monarchy they had just overthrown, and who preferred power to be divided within the executive, perhaps even among a triumvirate; all the better to check any one individual’s power, echoing some Roman republicans during Antiquity. Edmund Randolph, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention who opposed Wilson’s proposal, argued that a unitary executive would be the “fetus of monarchy.”

But Wilson got his executive, more or less, and Randolph refused to sign the Constitution – and in the end, the country got a domineering president. It also got the factionalism its founding fathers feared so deeply as they drafted its Constitution. That document doesn’t mention political parties, which Alexander Hamilton called “the most fatal disease” of democratic governments, recognizing that they risk not just factionalism, but cultism and seizure by a leader who may come to demand fewer and fewer constraints, until none exist. This way, democracy dies.

And so, more than two centuries later, King George III can find some solace: Monarchy is back in America. He’d called his shot, even, when he spoke to both British Houses of Parliament in October, 1775, vowing to resist the insurrectionists but, in his infinite grace, offering to welcome his flock back when they came to inevitably regret their revolution. “When the unhappy and deluded multitude, against whom this force will be directed, shall become sensible of their error, I shall be ready to receive the misled with tenderness and mercy!” he declared.

Welcome them back, indeed. But this might not have been what he had in mind: an imperious and gilded king, and a robust monarchical authority, but neither a Hanover nor even a Brit – an American, and a Trump.

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