The New Yorker:

Donald Trump tries to overturn the most basic meme of American history.

By Bill McKibben

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.

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