You Already Have A King

Trump walks, talks, and acts like a monarch. Even Democrats play along.

If you’re planning to attend a No Kings rally today, I hope you have a safe and satisfying time!

A slide from democracy into autocracy is a perfectly valid thing to object to, and exercising your right to demonstrate is a perfectly valid way to object to it. I won’t even rehash my usual gripe here about peaceful protest being a frequently useless form of resistance.

I’ll only say that this No Kings business is, I fear, a little past its sell-by. You’re a bit late to this party. Protesting against Donald Trump becoming an American king is like protesting the asteroid, after it hits.

This isn’t me arguing in favor of Trump constructing a throne, by the way, or his planting himself on it. I’m not defending or calling for that. I’m not exactly weeping into my beer over it either, but mostly because I think there’s just no point now.

This isn’t a thing that is going to happen. It’s not even a thing that is happening. It’s a thing that has happened.

In all but name, Donald Trump is the King of America. The only meaningful questions at this point are what benefits he’ll bring to the kingdom, how long he’s planning to hang around, and what kind of subjects we’re going to be

Let’s talk a little about actual monarchies.

There are presently 43 on earth, and I’ve spent more than a quarter of my life living one or another of them. When people fret about Trump as king, they’re generally reacting to the idea of the US becoming an absolute monarchy - one in which the sovereign holds significant or total power. Those are quite rare though; Saudi Arabia, Oman, Brunei.

Vatican City is actually an absolute monarchy, but a weird one. It’s the only one still in Europe, and the only one anywhere that’s non-hereditary.

Anyway, Trump becoming an absolute monarch is neither likely nor really even possible given our existing governmental infrastructure. There’s middle ground though, and where we are on it is debatable and movable. Still, no absolute king, and especially no hereditary transfer power is good, because man. Trump is one thing. But now that I’m really thinking about this, an absolute, hereditary monarchy in the United States right now is a truly shuddersome thought, especially if operating based on male-preference primogeniture.

But even in these monarchies, there’s still always a system that needs to be worked. There are bumpers and guardrails. The king doesn’t just get his way on everything. Whether you’re a student of history or you’ve just seen Game of Thrones, you know this.

I bring it up because beyond the aesthetics, King Trump isn’t actually so weird an idea. Even a normally inclined American president holds more power than most of the world’s actual kings and queens do. Our system was constructed to prevent the formation of a monarchy, but less so its trappings. The American chief executive is checked, balanced too even, but he can still do a lot of things without having to ask anyone for permission.

Which is another important point: you can absolutely have the most awful characteristics of medieval monarchy without an actual monarch. Of course you can. The Soviet Union comes to mind. So does Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, North Korea under the Kims, and for that matter, Germany under Hitler. The absence of a crown does not mean the presence of freedom or peace.

The No Kings direction that animated the Founding Fathers only felt so urgent to them because George III was a mentally ill douchebag who wouldn’t be reasoned with. Jefferson may have been spooked into wanting a weak executive but Adams wasn’t. Adams wasn’t alone, and his side clearly did a better job of playing the long game.

The way we know that Trump is a king, is that everyone - and I do mean everyone; yes, even the No Kings protesters - are already treating him as one. We’re like test strips, clarifying the identity of this substance - Trump - by our reactions to it. We’re reagents. We know what he is because of what we do around him.

He ignores the separation of powers, and we let him. He sends soldiers to our cities, and in they march. He skims from our register, and we shrug - not because we’re tolerant of corruption, but because at a certain point, it stops feeling like corruption at all. The king just eats first. We know this. We evolved to know it. It’s how it is.

Understanding Trump’s rule as fundamentally monarchical is important though, because it informs how we should interact with him. Republicans aren’t winning right now because Trump is one of them - in a lot of real ways, he isn’t. They’re winning because they’ve accepted their status as royal subjects and Democrats haven’t.

Democrats can’t. They’re the opposition party in a two-party system (or so they think). Opposing is what they do. If they knelt before the throne, they’d lose their very life force. But America isn’t really a two-party state at present, and this behavior is no longer remotely impactful.

And if Democrats can’t work with Trump, Trump won’t work with them. By his reckoning, they all want to put him prison and kill him.

Actually, that’s not just Trump’s reckoning, it’s what’s true. Why wouldn’t Democrats want that? They may not have acknowledged it, but they sense too that minority influence (political minority, not demographic minority) - even just conceptually - is on the wane.

That’s what I mean when I say that Democrats not only aren’t posing a meaningful challenge to Trump’s coronation, they’re actually legitimizing it. They aren’t treating him like an opposition president. They’re treating him like a tyrant. Like a ruler. Like a king.

You have to sort of pity them. What do you do when you’re trying to save the Republic, and here comes this spray-tanned Caesar, red-hatted Praetorians in tow, storming into Rome and trying to make it his own, personal theme park? What you do is, you sharpen your knives. And they did. But then they whiffed.

Caesar lived.

Because of this dynamic, torturing Democrats is more pleasing to Trump than would be doing deals with them. He doesn’t need them for anything. He controls the Republicans, and it’s Republicans who control the organs of state. Plus Democrat pain gives him a chubby.

The moral of the story is that Democrats have displeased His Majesty and His Majesty now holds them in disfavor. Well, you can’t be in disfavor in a monarchy and still be effective. Kings only give stuff to people they like, and if you’re a Democrat right now, Donald I does not fucking like you.

I don’t fault Democrats for this, really. They were just doing what they thought were their jobs. If they still lived in a republican democracy, they might even have been doing them well. But we’re in Westeros now, and Westeros doesn’t have political parties. It has friends to the crown, and it has rebels.

And it means that we can no longer rely on Democrats to help produce meaningful works of government. They aren’t even really a party anymore, they’ve made themselves an insurgency. Just one that controls no territory of its own, commands no swords, and that everyone still mostly hates for that time they spent 10 years trying to get people fired for not knowing they weren’t allowed to say ‘all lives matter.’

The monarch transcends party politics. Always. He doesn’t muck around in it, because he doesn’t have to. Across the pond, Charles works with Labour, Charles works with the Tories, and should the time come, Charles will work with Reform. The nobles may squabble, but the throne is the throne.

Trump already wears this vibe quite comfortably. He isn’t motivated by ideology, and he hurls his barbs at Republicans and Democrats alike. He appears to care about one thing, and one thing only: what’s good for Donald Trump.

He governs by command, not consensus. He doesn’t follow rules, he breaks them. He makes his own. He expects everyone in his administration to understand that their job is not what it says on the .gov website, it’s to make him happy. And the second they lose sight of that, they’ll be replaced by someone who won’t.

For Americans used to merit and competence over loyalty and subservience (and to the pretense that their public servants work for them) this can all represent kind of a sour egg to suck. But it can also be survivable. Consider all the good things that the good men who came before him wanted, but failed, to do. Intentions really aren’t much in this business. They’re worth about the same as last week’s toilet paper.

Trump is a productive results-getter. Now, it’s always an open question whether the results he’ll get will be good ones or bad ones, but that’s something we can manipulate.

Like a good president, a good king understands that what’s good for the realm is good for him too. With Trump, the trick is just knocking his personal priorities into alignment with the nation’s. Which is absolutely doable.

Stylistically, he’s crude and he’s vulgar, but the man knows how to wield power. And he seems to have decided that the hardest dunk he could score on his enemies right now would be to outperform their expectations. File that under: It Could Be A Lot Worse.

He wants affordable prescription drugs because he wants folks to have to thank him every time they take one. He wants peace in the Middle East for bragging rights, but he still wants it! And if he ends up holding points in one or two of those casinos about to go up in Gaza, hey, doesn’t the guy deserve his piece? The crown may lay heavy, but nobody said there weren’t perks.

I don’t care about systems of government, I care about the actions of government. I’m okay with monarchies because the ones I’ve called home function reasonably well. Whether or not Trump plays by the rules will always matter less to me than his output. I’m just not that interested in his process, except as a spectator.

I wrote a (mostly) tongue-in-cheek post once about how I thought Trump actually would serve a third term. Maybe a fourth, if he’s got it in him. Whatever happens though, we’re stuck with the guy for the next three years anyway. I would rather get something out of those years than spend them crying on the sidelines.

Democrats may not be the vehicle for it, and I think they aren’t. But the wider left - and certainly populists - can probably get something out of this guy. It might be as simple as choking down our pride and just kissing the ring.

Remember the time he appeared to endorse single payer healthcare? Do we think he reversed himself on that because he earnestly changed his mind, or because everyone else who supported it refused to stop calling him pedophile Hitler?

Seething, TDS revulsion made sense when there was reason to think it was a useful posture. There is no longer any reason to think that.

Every attack Trump has survived has only made him stronger. Democrats think he’s Voldemort, but that’s the wrong Harry Potter reference. He’s actually goblin silver. He’s the Sword of Gryffindor, basically, absorbing hits and poisons, and only getting stronger from them.

As you take to the streets rallying for No Kings today, meditate, if you will, on one of the most famous of those ever: Henry VIII.

Like Trump, Henry was a fat, intemperate prick, who cared only for himself, and who was hated by so many of his countryman, he turned a considerable number of them violently against him. But Henry can’t be rounded down to just bully. He was a change maker.

Aside from his personal conduct - like that business about his executing a few of his wives - we don’t even really talk now about whether he was a good king or a bad king. There’s just too much on that plate for an up or down verdict. What he was was transformative.

Like Trump’s, his transformations were driven by self interest more than altruism. Henry broke with the Catholic Church, not over any liturgical dispute, but because he wanted a new baby-making machine and they wouldn’t let him shop for one. Doesn’t that approach to power sound powerfully familiar these days?

His legacy is a very complicated one, but Henry VIII undeniably left England a markedly different place from the county he inherited. Do we really think Trump couldn’t end up becoming such a figure? And in the event he turns out to be, how sure are we really that everyone will want to just put things back to how they were before he descended that escalator?

Another Henry lesson: look what became of the people who challenged him. Who got in his way and tried to interfere with his project. And I don’t mean that he killed them. That wasn’t great either, but if Trump is going to start sending Democrats to the actual chopping block, what’s he been waiting for? I mean that those people rendered themselves ineffectual. They destroyed their possible legacies, as much as their lives.

Thomas More didn’t just lose his head, he lost his influence. He lost any ability he might have had to manage the Reformation’s fallout in ways more favorable to English Catholics. His noble stand washed him out of power, and the conditions he wanted to mitigate came about anyway. At a certain point in politics, you’ve just lost. It’s over. The clock has run out. You can try to keep playing, but there’s zero chance you win anything.

You can play in another game though. You can dust yourself off, accept what you can’t change, and make your best way in the new world.

A big difference between monarchies and democracies is that in democracies it makes sense to complain about the boss. In monarchies, complaining about the boss is like complaining about the snow. You’ve got the same amount of snow, you just feel bad about it.

I’ve found it helpful to regard Trump as already a king. That framing clarifies a lot of his behavior, especially his bad behavior, and it’s made it easier for me to predict what he’s going to do next.

Try it sometime. The next time you find yourself thinking, “excuse me, but this is not how an American president would behave,” consider whether it maybe is how a king would behave. You might be surprised how often the answer is a short, easy, clarifying yes.

And that might tell you something.

If you find that too repulsive a thought to accept, I can completely understand. But a feature of monarchies is that they don’t make an abundance of space for the thoughts of their subjects. Your acceptance of reality is immaterial to it.

The reason you have a king is that you created a king. If Trump was “Not Your President,” it meant he had to be something else.

And I know he revolts you, but a small comfort you can take here is that the personal moralities of monarchs are far less important to their subjects than their accomplishments. In the pantheon of English kings, virtually none of them would you have let babysit your kids. Some of them worked out anyway.

If you really didn’t want King Donald Trump, you should not have crowned King Donald Trump. You did though. You decided, before either of his presidencies were even inaugurated, that you were dealing with something fundamentally different to just an opposition leader you didn’t like. This was, you told us, the end of American Democracy.

And then so it was. You may not have meant to, but you directly anointed this. You anointed him.