Maybe the mad king, the other one, wasn’t so mad after all.
“George III is Abraham Lincoln compared to Trump,” said Rick Atkinson, who is vivifying the Revolutionary War in his mesmerizing histories “The British Are Coming” and “The Fate of the Day.” The latter, the second book in a planned trilogy, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for six weeks and is being devoured by lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
As the “No Kings” resistance among Democrats bristles, and as President Trump continues to defy limits on executive power, it is instructive to examine comparisons of President Trump to George III.
“George isn’t the ‘royal brute’ that Thomas Paine calls him in ‘Common Sense,’” Atkinson told me. “He’s not the ‘tyrant’ that Jefferson calls him in the Declaration of Independence, and he’s not the sinister idiot who runs across the stage in ‘Hamilton’ every night singing ‘You’ll Be Back.’”
(“And when push comes to shove, I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love!”)
Yes, George III had manic episodes that scared people — depicted in Alan Bennett’s “The Madness of George III,” a play made into a movie with Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren. Palace aides are unnerved when the king’s urine turns blue.
“He was in a straitjacket for a while, that’s how deranged he was,” Atkinson said. “His last 10 years were spent at Windsor, basically in a cell. He went blind and deaf. He had long white hair, white beard.”
King George was relentless about his runaway child, America.
“He’s ruthless,” Atkinson explained, “because he believes that if the American colonies are permitted to slip away, it will encourage insurrections in Ireland, in Canada, the British Sugar Islands, the West Indies, in India, and it’ll be the beginning of the end of the first British Empire, which has just been created. And it’s not going to happen on his watch.”
Unlike Trump, who loves to wallow in gilt and repost king memes and rhapsodize about God’s divine plan for him, George III did not flout the rule of law.
“The stereotype of him as an ogre is not historically true,” Atkinson said. “He’s called Farmer George because he’s interested in agronomy and writes essays on manure.”
The historian added: “You can dislike him, but he’s not a reactionary autocrat. He is very attentive to the requirements imposed on him as a consequence of the reforms in the 17th century, where he must be attentive to both houses of Parliament. He’s a child of the Enlightenment. He is a major supporter of both the arts and the sciences.” He plays the harpsichord and the organ and he’s a great patron of the theater.” (And doesn’t try to co-opt it or force people to watch “Cats.”)
Unlike Trump, Atkinson said, George III is not a narcissist: “He’s very committed to the realm, to his family. He marries this obscure, drab German princess, Charlotte, as in Charlottesville, Va., and Charlotte, N.C. They marry six hours after they meet. She learns to play ‘God Save the King’ on the harpsichord on the voyage from Germany to England. He has the marriage bedroom decorated with 700 yards of blue damask and large basins of goldfish. Because, as you know, nothing says ‘I love you’ like a bowl of goldfish. He’s devoted to her through 15 kids.”
Atkinson said that the only similarity between the pious monarch and the impious monarch manqué is “the use of the military against their own people to enforce the king’s will. There are incidents, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party.”
He added: “This proclivity for using armed forces for domestic suppression of dissent. That’s a slippery slope in this country. It led to an eight-year war when George did it, and Lord knows where it’s going to lead this time.”
This is a poisonous moment for our country, with Trump unleashing our military on American citizens and letting ICE officers rough up Democratic lawmakers. He’s still posting, madly, about the 2020 election being “a total FRAUD,” and now he’s calling for a special prosecutor to look into it. With the juvenile delinquent Pete Hegseth leading our military, Trump is recklessly jousting with Iran and threatening to assassinate the Iranian leader. The former opponent of forever wars in the Middle East is debating dropping bombs in the Middle East without military provocation against the United States — which did not work out well for us in the past — and dragging us into another unpredictable, interminable war.
We find this truth to be self-evident: This is the moment when we find out just how mad a king Donald Trump is.
Atkinson concedes he is as mystified as the rest of us by Trump’s affinity for “those who aren’t bound by the rules by which we insist our leaders be bound.
“The fact that we’re looking for a monarch to draw parallels to him is telling in and of itself, because that’s not what we do. That’s what the whole shooting match was about in the 1770s.”
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Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. She is the author, most recently, of “Notorious.” @MaureenDowd • Facebook
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