‘The Return of the King’: Trump Embraces Trappings of the Throne

Politics


At a late-night inaugural ball on Monday, President Trump, flush with his restoration to power, began waving a ceremonial sword he had been given almost as if it were a scepter and he were a king.

Perhaps it is a fitting metaphor as Mr. Trump takes control in Washington again this week with royal flourishes and monarchical claims to religious legitimacy. His return to the White House has been as much a coronation as an inauguration, a reflection of his own view of power and the fear it has instilled in his adversaries.

His inaugural events have been suffused with regal themes. In his Inaugural Address, he claimed that when a gunman opened fire on him last summer, he “was saved by God to make America great again,” an echo of the divine right of kings. He invoked the imperialist phrase “manifest destiny,” declared that he would unilaterally rename mountains and seas as he sees fit and even claimed the right to take over territory belonging to other nations.

At an event with supporters at Capital One Arena, he introduced his relatives one at a time as if presenting the royal family, and he stood elevated on a platform looking down on supporters who were brought onto stage. By evening, reinstalled in the Oval Office, he relished signing one executive order after another, single-handedly reversing longstanding policies and instituting his own with the stroke of a black Sharpie pen.

Mr. Trump particularly delights in his pardon power, the most kingly element of a president’s authority, one that cannot be challenged or overturned. He used it to wipe away the charges and convictions of about 1,600 supporters who rampaged through the Capitol four years ago on his behalf, including violent seditionists. At the same time, he signed an order attempting to rewrite the 14th Amendment to ban birthright citizenship for the children of many immigrants.

And in the weeks since his comeback election in November, Mr. Trump has asserted his dominance in the political space, making little effort to recognize anyone else’s authority in a three-branch government, but instead making it clear that he expects other actors in the system to bend to his will.

Of course, plenty of presidents look powerful, even kingly, in their opening days, when they are often at the peak of their popularity and enjoying the rituals of inauguration, only to later fall to earth as opposition builds and their approval ratings erode. In Mr. Trump’s case, for all his swagger, he faces a Congress with narrow majorities and courts that may eventually derail some of his more expansive assertions of power.

In fact, within hours of his initial burst of executive action, Mr. Trump’s opponents quickly filed the first legal challenges, likening him to a budding autocrat. “Presidents are powerful, but he is not a king,” Matthew J. Platkin, New Jersey’s attorney general, declared on Tuesday as he and some of his peers went to court to try to block Mr. Trump from enforcing his birthright citizenship ban.

Mr. Trump’s allies do not shrink from the comparison. They embrace it. “The Return of the King,” Elon Musk, his billionaire benefactor, wrote triumphantly on social media shortly after Mr. Trump took the oath on Monday. Kash Patel, his designated F.B.I. director, published the final volume in a children’s book trilogy last fall about investigations into Mr. Trump called “The Plot Against the King.” Various T-shirts marketed to Trump fans show the president in a crown with or labeled “King Trump.”

“The return of the king? It certainly looked that way at the swearing-in,” said Gwenda Blair, who wrote the definitive biography of Mr. Trump’s dynastic family. “Not only because of Trump’s claim to God’s intervention, but also all the favor-seeking courtiers, Melania’s crown-like hat and the dynastic implications of showcasing his progeny.”

Ms. Blair said that since his defeat in the 2020 election, Mr. Trump has felt a deep-seated need to restore his brand as a winner. “And what better way than to claim his right — his divine right — to that status?” she asked. “To be, as it were, a king.”

The prospect of a king in America has always been a sensitive issue. After breaking off from Britain, the framers were determined to avoid even what one delegate to the Constitutional Convention called the “fetus of monarchy.” George Washington cemented that view by making sure he was called “Mr. President,” not some version of “your majesty,” and stepping aside after eight years.

Many of his successors, by contrast, were accused of wanting to be monarchs. Opponents called Andrew Jackson “King Andrew I” and referred to Abraham Lincoln as “King Abraham.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, who broke Washington’s two-term tradition, was said to harbor royal aspirations, and Richard M. Nixon was accused of fostering the “imperial presidency.”

“But in the annals of presidential history, one struggles to find a leader who wouldn’t have found the term ‘king’ at least somewhat insulting,” said Jeffrey A. Engel, the director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Not Mr. Trump, it seems. “In highlighting his family to such a degree during his swearing-in, President Trump furthers the notion that he and they are special, removed from regular society.”

Gene Healy, the senior vice president for policy at the Cato Institute, said Mr. Trump’s version was a little distant from the monarchy the framers feared. “If this is the full-grown thing, it has to be a lot less high-toned and regal than they feared,” he said. “Boogieing with the Village People? Signing stacks of executive orders and pardons in a hockey stadium? There’s a heavily camp aspect to Trump’s performance of the presidency that monarchical metaphors miss.”

Still, Mr. Healy, the author of “The Cult of the Presidency,” said that power had been accruing to the Oval Office since long before Mr. Trump’s return. He cited President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s willingness to assert executive authority to eliminate student loan debt and to try to compel Americans to buy certain kinds of cars.

“Fundamental questions of governance that used to be left to Congress, the states or the people are now increasingly settled, winner-take-all, by whichever party manages to seize the presidency,” he said. “Trump didn’t create this suite of powers, but he’s quite comfortable using them.”

Indeed, Mr. Trump’s view of these powers has long been expansive. During his first term, he said the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want as president” and after leaving office suggested “termination” of the Constitution so as to immediately remove Mr. Biden and return himself to office without an election. His new vice president, JD Vance, once said that if Mr. Trump won again, he should simply defy courts that rule against his policies.

Mr. Trump has long had a royal fixation, at least for the British version. He idolized Queen Elizabeth II and cherished meeting her before her death, saying they had “automatic chemistry.” On his office wall after leaving office, he hung a blown-up picture of himself with her, and he has maintained a running correspondence with King Charles III, whom he has called a “really wonderful guy.”

But Peter Westmacott, a former deputy private secretary to Charles and later ambassador to the United States, said monarchy in the British sense is balanced by a strong sense of public duty and obligation to follow the guidance of elected ministers. “That may not be the kind of kingship which Donald Trump has in mind, even if he believes that God spared him from the assassin’s bullet for a special purpose,” Mr. Westmacott said.

Mr. Trump favors the glittery and hereditary aspects of monarchy. He styles his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida as a winter palace of sorts and has positioned his children as heirs in lordly fashion. While campaigning for president in 2016, he suggested making his daughter Ivanka Trump his running mate, a notion that his stunned staff even poll-tested before she finally persuaded him to drop what even she considered an absurd idea.

Ms. Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, later served on the White House staff and in ceremonial events were often treated as if a prince and princess. But the president never fully gave up the idea of promoting Ms. Trump to U.N. ambassador or president of the World Bank.

In picking Mr. Vance as his vice president this time, Mr. Trump was following the advice of his son Donald Trump Jr. Mr. Vance is half the elder Mr. Trump’s age, young enough to be his son, and now may be his successor in four years.

Or will he? Mr. Trump has more than once broached the idea that maybe he would try to stay in power longer than four more years despite the 22nd Amendment’s two-term limit passed after Roosevelt ran four times. He has said it in a joking manner, and the amendment is clear that he cannot run again, but some opponents worry he may try to find a way around it anyway just as he is now with the 14th Amendment.

Mr. Trump has been trying to get around limits on presidential power for years. When he tried to block Congress from forcing one of his aides to testify about him in 2019, Ketanji Brown Jackson, then a federal judge and now a Supreme Court justice, rebuked him by saying that “presidents are not kings.”

He was more successful in winning substantial immunity from criminal charges from the Supreme Court last year. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, concluded that Justice Jackson was wrong after all. “The president,” she wrote, “is now a king above the law.”

Mr. Trump never rebutted her. Now the question is how far he will go to test that proposition — and whether he will eventually find that a president, in the end, is still a president, even with a ceremonial sword.



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