Over the weekend, as millions of Americans attended "No Kings" protests, President Donald J. Trump's social media accounts responded by posting images not just of Trump as a king—defecating on Americans, even—but also of Vice President J.D. Vance in a royal crown, suggesting that American democracy has been supplanted by tyranny that will last past Trump into the future.
In the United States, no man is a monarch: the law is supposed to be king. In January 1776, newly arrived immigrant Thomas Paine published Common Sense, explaining to his new countrymen why they should declare independence from the King of England. He called for a new government based not in heritage or tradition, but in the law. "[I]n America the law is king," Paine wrote. "For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other."
But under Trump, the law is under attack...
HCR https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-20-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios
This made me wonder what George Washington would've thought about the recent discourse of an American president becoming King of the United States. While the common myth is that George Washington was given the opportunity to be monarch of the US, in actuality, he simply responded to a letter proposing a government system where there's partial representative democracy, and part an authoritarian leader. In this letter he wrote that this idea brought him "a mixture of great surprise & astonishment," and that "no occurrence in the course of the War, has given me more painful sensations than your information of there being such ideas existing in the Army as you have expressed, & I must view [this idea] with abhorrence, and reprehend with severity." Our founding father George Washington, first president of the United States of America, was absolutely opposed to any type of authoritarian leadership.
ReplyDeleteSources
“From George Washington to Lewis Nicola, 22 May 1782,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-08501
"Was George Washington Really Offered a Chance to Be King of the U.S.?" Dave Roos, HowStuffWorks,
https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/was-george-washington-really-offered-king-us.htm
Mackenzie Harris, Section 2
ReplyDeleteWhen I saw this post originally, I thought that someone else had to have posted it because there was no way the President of the Unites States accounts did, but to my shock I was proven wrong. It is crazy how far our country as come since our first President; George Washington and I find it hard to believe he would be impressed with how much of the government he put in place has changed. This country is always supposed to be a democracy and lately it has looked like anything but that. I hope we can right the wrongs of electing certain people into office, and I really hope this election result has shed light on how much disfunction we are in.