No Kings
Washington's life was the rebuttal. Trump's record is the charge.
I’ve been preparing material for my seminar at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics on the relationship between the presidency and the press. Working through Harold Holzer’s history of that relationship, I came across a familiar anecdote — familiar enough that it’s the book’s opening scene. It is a useful lens for this moment, this weekend’s
No Kings” protests, and the self-assessment we’re all encouraged to engage in 250 years after the birth of the nation.
In the summer of 1793, five months into his second term, George Washington carried a political cartoon into his cabinet meeting. The image — crude, deliberately vicious — accused him of siding with Britain over France in the war then consuming the continent. The guillotine was not a metaphor, Louis XVI had been executed in January. To put Washington’s head on one was to call him royalty, and to suggest history had a verdict for sovereigns.
Washington kept his anger under strict control in most cases. So Jefferson, his Secretary of State, took note when the president “got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself.” He hurled the paper to the floor. He dared anyone present to name a single act of his presidency not taken on “the purest motives.” Then the father of the country, in front of his entire cabinet, said he would rather be in his grave than sitting in that chair.
The accusation was that Washington had betrayed the republic he’d founded, chosen monarchy over revolution, Britain over France, aristocracy over the people.
But Washington had a defense. His life. He had been offered the crown, more or less directly several times.1 After the Revolution, when he could have held power indefinitely, he resigned his commission and went home to Mount Vernon. At the end of his presidency he would do it again — refusing a third term, establishing the norm that would hold for 150 years.
Jefferson, who spent much of Washington’s second term in opposition to the general’s vision of the presidency, still couldn’t deny the man underneath the policies. “He errs as other men do, but errs with integrity,” he later wrote. Washington’s virtue was so established, anvil-tested by repeated acts of relinquishment, that the charge felt like overreach.
Now run the same charge against president Donald Trump.
Asked about the October No Kings protests, Trump told reporters: “I’m not a king.” A flat denial with nothing underneath it. No life’s work to point to. No resignations, no surrendered power, no Cincinnatus moment. No prior act, no record of restraint, nothing to make the charge feel like slander.
The public has rendered a verdict. Majorities of Americans now believe the president has improperly used his office to enrich himself or misused his position for personal gain, with only 21% expressing confidence that he acts ethically. Nearly seven-in-ten Americans believe the president is trying to exert more power than his predecessors, with 52% viewing him as a dangerous dictator and 54% concluding he has exceeded his constitutional authority, while only 25% remain confident he respects democratic values.
But the characterological gap is only the first disconnect. Washington’s cartoon was a conclusion drawn from a single policy choice — one neutrality proclamation, one perceived tilt toward Britain. The charge was an inference. In Trump’s case, those making the “No Kings,” charge cite a litany.
He announced his candidacy by declaring “I alone can fix it” — the distilled premise of monarchy, that the system requires a man rather than a mechanism. He has treated the Justice Department as an instrument of personal vengeance, pursuing enemies and protecting allies as the crown sees fit. He has claimed tariff powers that no previous president asserted and that Congress never explicitly granted. He recently acknowledged he avoids using the word “war” regarding Iran because he knows that word would require him to seek congressional approval — an admission that he is deliberately sidestepping the constitutional check, not unaware of it. He has pardoned January 6 defendants not case by case as acts of mercy, but en masse as a loyalty reward to people who acted in his name. He launched a personal cryptocurrency, World Liberty Financial, days before his inauguration, with no separation between his financial interests and the office he was about to assume. He ordered a military parade on his birthday — not a national commemoration, a celebration of him, using the armed forces as backdrop. He put his signature on the currency. He is knocking down the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom. He has used regulatory power to punish law firms, universities, and media organizations for perceived disloyalty, making clear that the law’s application depends on one’s relationship to him.
Any one of these, in isolation, might be explained. Together they describe a posture toward power — what it is for, who it serves, where it stops.
The answer to that last question is what Washington’s generation spent the summer of 1787 working out in Philadelphia. The mechanisms they built — separation of powers, congressional war authority, an independent judiciary, a free press — were not abstract commitments to good government. They were specific remedies for a specific disease. These men had read their history. They knew what leaders with unchecked power became. They designed the accountability into the system precisely because they did not trust character alone to hold.
Those mechanisms are what’s being tested now. Some are bending. Some may be breaking. The founders would not have been surprised. They built the safeguards because they knew that no man — not even Washington — should be trusted with a power that had no walls around it.
Washington raged at a cartoon. The charge against Washington couldn’t stick because the man’s life was the rebuttal. The charge against Trump sticks because the examples aren’t inferences. They’re a record. The founders knew this type. They built the mechanisms specifically for him. The question isn’t whether the charge is fair. It’s whether the mechanisms still work.
In 1782, Colonel Lewis Nicola wrote to him on behalf of discontented officers suggesting the country needed a monarchy and that Washington was the man for it. Washington’s reply was cold fury: the idea filled him with “abhorrence.”
We need the historical context...very like Heather Cox Richardson provides! Thanks!
The mechanisms are indeed bending and cracking. Even the judges who have held on to their integrity come up short when looking for anyone to enforce their judgments. It is quite frightening.
I'm not sure, at my age, that we can fix this in my lifetime. The rot is deep. Americans have such short attention spans.
My question, were I able to address the congressional congress, would be this, "How do you expect any consistency in long term governance with a 4/8 year term?" It seems we've just gone back & forth and back & forth for decades now accomplishing little of long term significance. There must be a middle path. But then, had they listened to Washington's entreaty against _any_ political parties, perhaps that would have lessened the misplaced loyalties?