The Framers’ Case Against an American Monarch

By now, even the most pugnacious anti-MAGA American among us must admit: Donald Trump holds sway over our times. Having dominated our politics for eight years, and installed to dominate it for four more, he is on a course to change American life more than any president in recent history has and to do so at a breakneck speed. Certainly more than Ronald Reagan. And, when the dust has settled, perhaps as much as Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose political coalition included the segregationist South, the working class, and the embittered voter, resentful that governmental institutions had failed them.

Now Trump has reassembled just such a coalition for the Republican Party, even as he works to dismantle the administrative state that grew directly from Roosevelt’s New Deal. It was Roosevelt’s frenetic “first 100 days” that carved the roughly three-month benchmark as a measure of presidential action and ambition. Today, Trump is moving at a comparable pace, trashing laws and norms in service of his vision of a reimagined America—one that many see as an authoritarian state.

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Like Trump, the most commanding chief executives in American history have been accused of having kingly ambitions and operating unconstitutionally—Roosevelt, for sure, but Abraham Lincoln too, whose constitutionally dubious Emancipation Proclamation was, like Trump’s earliest moves, an executive order. But neither Lincoln nor Roosevelt approached the self-righteous behemoth before us now: a president who sees himself as above all law (thanks, in large part, to a right-leaning Supreme Court supermajority); as divinely chosen, saved by God from a would-be assassin’s bullet; and as a modern savior, delivering “his people” to the promised land resembling an America that never was. “They’re not coming after me,” he declared after being indicted in the now dismissed classified-documents case. “They’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way.” Yet has Trump ever manically promoted someone else’s interests more than his own?

Trump’s monarchical designs would certainly have rankled the nation’s founders. They mounted a revolution to get out from under the thumb of the British crown. Successful, they then faced the arduous task of deciding what kind of government fit the aspirations of the American experiment. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph dreamed of a government that befit the “fixt genius of the people of America,” per notes taken by James Madison. James Wilson urged his fellow delegates to craft a system that, “instead of being the fetus of monarchy, would be the best safeguard against tyranny”—for having been subject to tyranny, the Framers feared it most. Madison pressed the convention to set some powers of the executive in a position dependent on the will of the legislature.

So what would Madison say now to a Congress that has effectively ceded the legislature’s constitutionally mandated power of the purse to Elon Musk and other Trump officials looking to squeeze funds appropriated by Congress for policy initiatives—particularly funds for efforts that Trump does not favor, including virtually the entirety of American foreign aid, which Musk proudly claimed he was feeding “into the wood chipper”? Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina acknowledged that all of this “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” He added, however, that “nobody should bellyache about that.” This, from a member of the party that has long advocated for a “strict constructionist” view of the Constitution.

And how would the Framers have reacted to Vice President JD Vance, who on Sunday—in response to judges’ orders to halt a raft of Trump-approved actions, including one giving Musk’s minions widespread access to Treasury Department data—posted a strident broadside against the judiciary branch, stating that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power”? Trump declared much the same, insisting, “No judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of decision.” The administration’s lawyers have followed with a legal salvo that pits the purported interests of the executive branch against those of the federal judiciary and a group of attorneys general. And on Monday, by Politico’s count, “five different judges around the US issued temporary blocks on five different Trump-ordered executive actions.” A constitutional crisis, some legal scholars believe, may already be at hand.

As they crafted the Constitution, the delegates in Philadelphia knew who the nation’s first president would inevitably be. George Washington, even then, was viewed as the “father of the country.” He was, as historian James Flexner called him, America’s “indispensable man.” Being used to life under a monarch, the new nation’s citizens were, at first, tempted to treat Washington like one. His image was everywhere in 1790s America, and the mythology surrounding him had, as historian Joseph Ellis put it, “grown like ivy over a statue, effectively covering the man with an aura of omnipotence, rendering the distinction between his human qualities and his heroic achievements impossible to delineate.” Even Vice President John Adams, serving under Washington, showed himself vulnerable to such infatuation when he floated the idea that the president be referred to as “His Highness” or “His Majesty,” making himself the target of jokes—including the jibe that Adams, with his ample girth, should thereafter be referred to as “His Rotundity.” Yet Washington’s final act as president was to bend before republican principles: to voluntarily resign after two terms, a move that established the office as more important than the man—and that set a two-term precedent that lasted until Roosevelt ran successfully for four.

In reaction to Roosevelt, Congress reasserted Washington’s example by passing the 22nd Amendment, barring presidents from serving more than two terms. Undaunted even by that law, though, Trump has floated the idea of running for a third term. Perhaps he will claim a loophole in the 22nd Amendment by interpreting it as disallowing a third term only when that third term follows two consecutive terms—or, barring that, maybe he’ll run for vice president on a 2028 ticket headed by Vance and then effectively rule the country from the nation’s second position (akin to the Vladimir Putin–Dmitry Medvedev so-called tandemocracy, in which Putin’s proxy, Medvedev, ran Russia during an interregnum, from 2008 to 2012, before Putin resumed power). In a move even more redolent of monarchy, Trump could back one of his children for president, thereby sanctioning a hereditary passing of the throne from the king to his prince or, in the case of Ivanka, princess. When you believe the law does not apply to you, just about anything is possible.

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Trump’s proposal to use US Army troops on the southern border—not to resist a foreign army invasion but to prevent illegal entry— and to use the military to remove undocumented immigrants already in America and assist in deporting them, would also have disturbed the founders, especially Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Madison believed that a standing army, even one justified as a defense from foreign dangers, would inevitably be used as an “instrument” of tyranny at home. Alexander Hamilton, as well, worried about the potential for a permanent army to be used “as the engine of despotism.” Equally suspicious, Jefferson paused over the establishment of a military academy at West Point during his presidency, concerned that it could become an incubator for a warrior class. He justified it as a school of engineering—one of his passions––and situated the Army Corps of Engineers on site to work on the building of roads and canals for the new nation.

Tempered by such admonitions, those drafting the Constitution insisted that funding to support a federal army be subject to biannual reauthorization so that Congress could maintain control over it, and for most of American history, peacetime armies were small and not adequate for immediate battle. Only since World War II has the United States built a large, permanent defensive establishment—indeed, a military-industrial complex, as Dwight D. Eisenhower called it. Even then, the need to keep the armed forces under civilian control has been closely guarded. Donald Trump challenged that. In his first term, he engaged in an act of extraordinary political theater when, in response to nationwide street riots over the killing of George Floyd, he threatened to deploy armed troops to American cities and then bizarrely marched from the White House to nearby St. John’s Church, the so-called “Church of the Presidents,” where he held aloft a Bible before television cameras and the slowly developing crowd, looking like he was either presiding over an exorcism or, as Evan Osnos wrote, showing off a product on QVC

A common summary of the first Trump presidency was that, despite enormous pressure, the guardrails established by the founding generation held. The very serious question now is: In spite of all odds, can they hold again?