Rant

What we mean when we say, "No Kings"

John Bull farting merrily in the face of a portrait of King George III, in response to the 1798 suspension of habeas corpus rights in Britain (passed by Parliament to allow the king to order the arrest without evidence for sedition of the members of English Jacobin clubs during the war with France) while a neighbor accuses him of treason, as President Trump accused The New York Times's David Sanger of treason last week for suggesting that Trump's Iran war might not be a brilliant victory, at least not yet. Caricature via Wikipedia by Richard Newton, who was not arrested for the work, though he sadly died that year of typhus, at the age of 21.

Uh, no. Charles III isn’t the kind of king we have in mind. The last time Britain had a king comparable to Trump, particularly in the line of trying to bypass the parliamentary power of the purse and making spending decisions on everything from disaster relief to public architecture without consulting the legislature, especially imposing taxes without their consent as Trump keeps trying to do with his stupid tariffs, they cut off his head.

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That was Charles I, in 1649, and English/Scottish kings have mostly learned their lesson since then. In the US, we have a funny idea of these developments, inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s ferocious catalogue of the abuses of George III in the Declaration of Independence, but the fact is that Jefferson was personalizing the issue for propaganda purposes: it was Parliament, not George, that was responsible for the “absolute tyranny” in America the document complained of, just as it was Parliament that suspended habeas corpus in Britain 20-odd years later. It was Parliament, not the king, that had the legal authority to do these things, as it had since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (in which they allowed James II to go into exile in France instead of chopping his head off), and Parliament that rejected or simply ignored Benjamin Franklin’s ideas for an Imperial Parliament in which Americans could be elected members.

No English monarch since the early 17th century has attempted anything like the Personal Rule of Charles I beginning out of the king’s conflict with Parliament over his insistence on going to war with Spain on ascending the throne after his father’s death in 1625, in the earliest phases of what was to become the Thirty Years’ War, assigning his father’s (reputedly sexual) favorite the Duke of Buckingham to plan an expedition to Cádiz that turned out to be one of a series of humiliating failures, in the course of which Parliament threatened to impeach Buckingham (twice!) and Charles in return dissolved it, finally deciding after Buckingham’s murder to govern the kingdom with no parliament at all, from 1629 to 1640, which was the spark of the Civil War.

Charles III is nothing whatever like that! Not necessarily because he’s a good king (for the record I’m sure he’s a perfectly adequate king, just not sure it’s a job that really needs to be filled, or that it’s worth the money it costs), but in the first place because he can’t. He has far less power than George IV did, for that matter, or Victoria, who at least played a role in the naming of ministers and setting priorities through the choice. He has nothing but whatever moral suasion he can exercise in regular private meetings with whoever the prime minister happens to be.

Trump, in contrast, has a lot in common with Charles I, with the very substantial powers given him in the 1787 Constitution, which have only grown since then while the British king’s powers are so much diminished in the same period, and his and his adjutants’ determination to expand them further at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches, in his and Russell Vought’s schemes to levy tariffs and reallocate appropriated funds from what Congress intended to whatever he feels like, and their impoundment of funds dedicated to causes he doesn’t like; and of course this year in his unexpected appetite for war, not just in the increasingly evident failure in Iran (which has had a startling resurrection since he obliterated the country a year ago), but also in Venezuela, where the war aims were simpler (kidnap a guy and revive the oil industry, which should be ready to roll in about ten years and $100 billion), and of course Cuba, where the proposed kidnap victim is 94 years old and the industry is music tourism, and I have no idea what the plan is. And then the linguistically violent assault on Greenland and Denmark, and the scarier threats to Canada and Mexico and possibly Colombia and Ecuador (off the Pacific coasts of which most of the fishing boat attacks have taken place, even though they were supposed to be aimed at Caribbean Venezuela).

To say nothing of the replacement of the professional civil service by a Mafia of unqualified hangers-on, and the suspension of habeas corpus (officially only for “illegal” immigrants but the agents have tough quotas to meet and can’t always be as careful as they should) and the vast enrichment of a class of tech oligarchs alongside the purveyors of religion, theorists and talking heads, retired spies and cops, quacks and charlatans, and of course the inevitable legislators, to serve as courtiers.

This is why we speak of Trump as a wouldbe king: not because of any resemblance to the amiable Charles III but to all the “friends” with whom he has such good relationships, the monarchs of Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar and North Korea (where the hereditary rule has prevailed since the 1940s), and the autocrats of Russia, China, and Türkiye, and Honduras, El Salvador, and Argentina, to what old Orbán called “illiberalism”, the rule of social immobility, because his people work to restore the 17th-century personal rule of fear and bribery. If there’s anybody who ought to understand that it should be JD Vance, who is so afraid of of Trump (who he once said could be “America’s Hitler”) that he won’t disagree with anything his majesty says, no matter how idiotic, as if he were afraid of getting his own head chopped off. That’s what we mean when we say “No Kings!”