CULTURE FILES // CLAIRE FINKELSTEIN'S CONSTITUTIONAL ASSESSMENT AT 250 YEARS
King George III
NO KINGS: Will the People Protect Democracy When Those in Power Do Not?
Volume 7 // Issue 3 // Winter 2026 // Denial
by Claire Finkelstein
I. A Republic, if We Can Keep It
On July 4, 2026, the United States celebrated the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, the event that severed the colonies from their allegiance to the British Crown. The document was a daring call to arms, one that would transform a domestic colonial uprising into a full-scale revolutionary war. It was also an act of treason, punishable under British law by death. For the signatories of that document, winning the war was now a matter of personal survival: If America lost, they would all hang.
What drove the Founders to this point? The text of the Declaration gives an indication of the motivations of its signatories in the beginning of the second paragraph, which famously proclaims it a “self-evident” truth that “All men are created equal.” By equality, they meant political equality—the equal right to vote, own land, serve in Parliament, etc. The incompatibility of those words with the profound inequities of eighteenth-century life—from the horrors of the slave trade to the denial of all political rights to women—makes the talk of equality in the Declaration an unfulfilled promise, to say the least. But the sentiment that drove it ultimately gave rise to a fuller conception of equality, one that afforded the same rights to all persons, regardless of race, sex, or other accidents of birth. In this sense, the signing of the Declaration was not just a call to revolution. It constituted the rejection of a highly stratified political system organized by nobility, class, and heredity; where those lacking such stature were governed and taxed but unrepresented. The Declaration of Independence was revolutionary, not just because it demanded an end to military-monarchical rule in the colonies, but because it was a call to replace the class system that sustained it with a new value, that of popular sovereignty.
With the birth of the country tied to the rejection of monarchical rule, one would expect America to be ever vigilant lest the country fall into a new state of political subservience. Yet now, at the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, vigilance has failed us. Indeed, one might say that the country is in the process of reverse-engineering the Declaration of Independence by imbuing the American presidency with the powers of a king. This is not just “democratic backsliding,” as many commentators these days are fond of saying. It is political servitude.
The enfeeblement of representational democracy was not inevitable. Human beings naturally decay with age, but not democracies. Systems of government can in fact grow healthier with time if the practices of the nation serve to reinforce constitutional ideals. But a constitution is more than a text; it is the application of a set of principles across time with constant updating to adapt to novel circumstances. This is why constitutional principles are subject to decay through disuse or misuse at the same time that dramatic constitutional transformations can occur with no alteration of the document at all. When the U.S. Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Court brought about a titanic change in our understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment: the rejection of the doctrine of “separate but equal” and a new understanding of equality as mandating racial integration. Nevertheless, the language of the Fourteenth Amendment remained unaltered.
Today, protections for civil rights and individual liberties under the U.S. Constitution are being rapidly reversed, a process that is occurring with no change to the text of the Constitution. But something even worse is happening: The very system the Founders established to protect those rights and liberties is being dismantled. This regression is one of the many consequences of allowing the power of the executive branch to go unchecked. But the undertow of presidential power has carried with it America’s own version of nobility—the billionaires who stand to benefit from the presidential empire. Fault also lies with a highly conservative U.S. Supreme Court that is increasingly dedicated to the project of enhancing presidential authority, and a Congress rendered impotent by its own allegiance to that self-same executive authority. In short, the constitutional remaking of today is being imposed from the top down, rather than from the bottom up, as was the American Revolution. The revolutionary ideal of popular sovereignty, which Americans were defending in 1776, is being replaced by a commitment to political subordination. The lack of accountability for this contemporary monarchy is precisely the sort of tyranny the Founders sought to reject. Yet now, two hundred and fifty years later in the birthplace of political equality, we the people have demonstrated an allegiance to an unaccountable king.
II. Did the Framers Underestimate the Risk that Presidential Power Would be Abused?
After the Revolution, the question of how closely the American presidency should resemble the British monarchy was a critical one for the Founders. John Adams, as a newly elected vice president, won for himself the derogatory title of “monarchist” by suggesting that the president should be adorned with a fancy title like “His Majesty the President” in order to bolster popular respect and awe for the office. But the U.S. Constitution provides that “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States,” and there was no sentiment in the House or Senate for attempting to skirt that rule. Adams’ concerns were at one level understandable. The nascent national government was weak, and the power of state governors was comparably strong. Adams believed that the idea of a federal government would not survive unless power was consolidated and the newly formed office of the presidency could rise above the power of state governments. The danger seemed all too real that the American presidency would never command the authority it needed to unite the country for its common defense against foreign nations.
The Anti-Federalists were worried in the other direction, of course, but their worry mostly extended to preserving the power of the states. They appear to have paid inadequate attention to whether the intended checks and balances in the federal government would fail to hold under the pressure exerted by a president who abused the power of his office.
Several years later, when the Constitution was drafted, the Founders did provide precautions against abuse of the presidency, namely, impeachment and voting every four years for the presidency. But these precautions seem tepid when one considers the enormous potential for abuse of office of which the Founders were aware. The Constitution creates a high bar to impeachment, and voting only happens every four years (and at the time of the founding, there were no term limitations). Why weren’t the Framers more preoccupied by the worry that the president could become a despot? Their image of a president, of course, was George Washington, not Donald Trump. But were they truly unable to imagine the office of the presidency occupied by a would-be dictator rather than a self-effacing defender of republican values?
Admittedly, Donald Trump is in a class of his own when it comes to breaking traditional constraints on presidential authority. Witness his mobilization of a paramilitary force designed to intimidate Americans from exercising their First Amendment rights; his misuse of the Department of Justice for punishing political rivals and granting favors to friends; his attempt to control the heads of federal agencies by simply removing anyone who is insufficiently loyal; and his blatantly unlawful use of federal troops both domestically and abroad. Each would have been profoundly difficult for Madison, Jefferson, or Hamilton to imagine.
Yet the idea that the Founders simply had a failure of imagination when it came to a future president like Donald Trump seems an unlikely explanation for the inadequacies of the guardrails they provided. Is Trump more grasping and more rapacious than, say, King George III? Were all the crowned heads of Europe that had abused power over the years truly unimpressive to the Framers, and were they truly so naïve as to believe despotism could not happen in America? By no means. The Declaration itself shows their awareness of the King’s “long train of abuses and usurpations,” which its signatories believed were inflicted to reduce them to a state of “absolute despotism.” Under such circumstances, they declared, “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Indeed, the complaints of the signatories to the Declaration about King George sound surprisingly modern. The Declaration charges the King with “mak[ing] judges dependent on his Will alone”; of “obstruct[ing] the Administration of Justice”; “[keeping] among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures”; and “render[ing] the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power,” among other indignities. The ensuing Constitution addressed all these matters in various places in various forms. It gave the legislature the power to create a Department of Justice and to require that it function according to law, which power Congress exercised as early as 1789; and it required a declaration of Congress to send U.S. troops into war and created a number of other countermeasures to balance out the risk of the emergence of a military dictatorship.
Ironically, the president now has the power to do all of the things of which the signers of the Declaration of Independence complained. Through various means, the president has managed to exert extraordinary control over the judiciary, largely based on his exercise of the power of appointment and the political ambitions of the judges on the bench. And the Department of Justice has currently lost even its former figleaf of independence from the president. Congress has long since ceased to serve as a check on the presidency, and the same might be said of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Perhaps most worrisome is the insertion of the U.S. military into law-enforcement operations and domestic policing. Throughout much of 2025, President Trump deployed federalized National Guard troops to American cities in blue-leaning states all across the country. He may not have literally quartered federal troops in the homes of Americans (one of the other complaints of the Founders regarding use of the military), but he interposed the military into civilian affairs, just as King George did. The Founders’ complaint that the king had “rendered the military independent of and superior to the Civil powers” appears to be no less true today than it was in 1776. The signatories to the Declaration would likely be as dismayed now as they were back then. As the Declaration warns, if we allow a sovereign to run roughshod over the very guardrails designed to protect the nation against tyranny, we should not be surprised if we see our liberties declining and our rights cast aside. Bad character alone cannot explain the damage the King George of 2026 has been able to inflict—though a bad character he certainly has. President Trump has been able to attack the foundations of democratic governance in the United States by transforming the office of the presidency itself. As the Founders decried with respect to the position of the British monarch, the American president is now, for all intents and purposes, above the law.
III. Equality Before the Law
The aspiration to political equality expressed by the Founders in the Declaration has close ties to a more modern notion, namely that of formal equality for all persons before the law. However imperfectly, the Founders laid the foundation for the idea that everyone is both subject to and protected by the law. That “everyone” includes the president of the United States. The president cannot be above the law, because to position him there would elevate him above we the people as well.
Since the time of the American Revolution, equality under the law has been the core value for which American democracy stands. It is the value that led men to risk their lives in battle fighting off the shackles of a king, and it is the very essence of a society governed by the rule of law. Establishing the president as a king—unaccountable and above ordinary law—is the antithesis of the rule of law. Now that America is 250 years old, isn’t it time for the country to remember its beginnings and reject the idea of an unaccountable sovereign as the leader of we the people?
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