They are just the latest in a long train of abuses. Time for the republic to strike back.

“It will be said, that we don’t propose to establish Kings. I know it. But there is a natural inclination in mankind to Kingly Government. It sometimes relieves them from Aristocratic domination. They had rather have one tyrant than five hundred. It gives more of the appearance of equality among Citizens, and that they like. I am apprehensive therefore, perhaps too apprehensive, that the Government of these States, may in future times, end in a Monarchy,” – Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

It has been a clarifying few days, hasn’t it?

My mind kept wandering to the fable of Hans Christian Andersen about the emperor’s new clothes. Insulated from any reality, surrounded entirely by yes-men, and utterly convinced of his own unique powers of observation, the Emperor struts forth one day sure of his new finery, but in fact, remains completely starkers. It takes one small boy to point out the feeble willy swinging in the breeze, and the exposure is complete. Indelible. Irrecoverable.

In this case, the bond market was the little boy. And the numbers proved what the cult kept denying: there was, and is, no coherence to the mad tariffs announced by the mad king — no strategy, no discernible math, no endgame, no rationality. It was just the crank who for decades has failed to understand trade finally acting out his long-held fantasies and delusions.

And that’s the other place my mind wandered, as I absorbed this insanity: how the Founders of America understood the core flaw of monarchy, and how uncannily similar our current plight seems to theirs. They saw kings as unpredictable, self-interested, insulated by courtiers, arrogant, and prone to huge errors of judgment and abuse of power. Vesting the interests of a nation in a single, unfettered person was a recipe for tyranny and instability. Franklin, having observed the British and French monarchies up-close for two decades, saw human nature as a warning against a singular executive.

This was especially true in the arena of foreign affairs, treaties, and tariffs, where a great nation needed stability and predictability if it was to grow and prosper and thrive in the opinion of mankind. Even Madison worried:

An individual who is observed to be inconstant to his plans, or perhaps to carry on his affairs without any plan at all, is marked at once, by all prudent people, as a speedy victim to his own unsteadiness and folly. His more friendly neighbors may pity him, but all will decline to connect their fortunes with his; and not a few will seize the opportunity of making their fortunes out of his.

The Russians, Chinese, Israelis, and Charles Schwab sure have.

Hamilton insisted that the American presidency would differ from a monarchy in foreign affairs in one key respect: “The one can perform alone what the other can do only with the concurrence of a branch of the legislature.” The Congress alone could declare war; the Senate alone could make treaties and set tariffs. The president’s job was to enforce their settled laws and treaties, not indulge his own whims. Taking the arbitrariness out of governance was foundational to the American project.

The last century, of course, has seen the Senate’s disgraceful abdication of their core constitutional role, with successive presidents crossing successive lines. But Trump — instinctually sensing the vacuum, and unencumbered by any understanding or knowledge of the Constitution — has dialed it to 11. He has effectively become an elected monarch, and is seen and worshipped as such by his people, his courtiers, and his advisers who know never to contradict a single thing the king says.

Trump’s second term can therefore be seen, I think, as the negation of the American idea. America is about the dispersal of power. Trump is about its intense concentration. America is about legal authority. Trump is about raw power. America was founded on a faith in reason. Trump embraces his own instinct alone. America is designed for a wide diversity of opinion. Trump governs solely for those who agree with him. America was designed to banish the corrupting trappings of monarchy. Trump is larding up the Oval Office with golden trinkets, planning a massive military parade to salute him, and his House allies have bills to replace Franklin for Trump on the $100 bill and carve him into Mount Rushmore.

Kings claimed divine right. Trump claims he was “saved by God to make America great again.”

In just the first few months of his second term, the president has claimed the right to declare a (non-existent) war (with Venezuela!) all by himself, and under those auspices, seize anyone off the streets, deny them a habeas hearing, and send them to a foreign prison from which there is no relief. That is what his impeachable deployment of the Alien Enemies Act means. And that is why his denial of habeas was struck down 9-0 even by this Supreme Court — which also, in another 9-0 ruling, ordered the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador.

As the judge noted, this was pure lawlessness: “As defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest [Abrego Garcia], no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere.” Nonetheless, Trump, like a totalitarian, responded by reiterating the lie that “he was a member of MS-13,” refuses to end the policy, and still won’t rescue the innocents he has consigned to a lifetime of hell. And now he’s floating the idea of banishing American citizens to foreign gulags.

Like a king, Trump regards as anathema any views that hold him or his friends to account. The First Amendment has been indefinitely suspended for some persons in the US — by monitoring the speech of foreign students to see if they oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, or indeed oppose the existence of Israel altogether. The Khalil case is remarkable because the State Department this week proudly provided no evidence — none — of criminal activity by Khalil, and openly argued that his views about a foreign country alone merit deportation. And this at a time when a majority of Americans have come to hold a negative view of the Jewish state.

Recall Hamilton’s definition of the monarchy as the right of a king to “of his own accord make treaties of peace, commerce, alliance…” Now consider: Trump has unilaterally scrapped trade deals made in his own first term; he has denied the sovereignty of Canada while threatening Greenland and Panama with military force; he is mulling whether to go to war with Iran right now; he has unilaterally endorsed the war crimes of ethnic cleansing in Palestine and Eastern Ukraine; and he has impulsively torn up long-standing alliances long defended by the Congress.

In all this, Trump has made every foreign nation and every domestic corporation dependent on him, and him alone, for relief. Here is his summary of this week’s insane gyrations on trade:

These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are. They are dying to make a deal. ‘Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir.’ And then I’ll see some rebel Republican, you know, some guy that wants to grandstand, say, ‘I think that Congress should take over negotiations.’ … [If] Congress takes over negotiating, sell America fast, because you’re gonna go busted.

And this was said to the faces of the National Republican Congressional Committee! The only reason Trump has these powers at all, of course, is because he has declared a “national emergency” on trade — a declaration as valid as his declaration of war against Venezuela. And Congress just sits there and bleats, “Thank you, thank you, sir, whatever you say, sir.” They have become the equivalent of Trump’s creepily subordinate cabinet members, mouthing sentiments of personal loyalty, cult worship, and North Korean-level flattery that would have reminded the Founders of nothing more than a decadent royal court. I mean, listen to this groveling subject of the king:

We are, I would say, more than friends — we’ve all become family. What you have assembled in your vision is a turning point and inflection point in American history. And so just being a part of that is being the greatest honor. Thank you for that.

Warming to his kingly aspirations, Trump has also decided to reinstate something like the ancient act of attainder — a device that kings once used to punish specific, named enemies of the crown without a trial. This week, in the manner of Tudor monarchs, he targeted two of his former aides, Christopher Krebs and Miles Taylor, solely because Krebs had correctly noted there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, and Taylor had written an anonymous op-ed. He wants them punished by the DOJ. Of course he does.

Trump accused the latter of “treason” (the usual charge in bills of attainder, such as Henry VIII’s against his minister, Thomas Cromwell) and the former of violating religious doctrine (the second charge against Cromwell). By religious doctrine, I mean Krebs “denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.” Trump is also out for more law firms who dare challenge his royal prerogatives. Of course he is. Would-be tyrants always attack civil institutions that could possibly harbor resistance: law firms, media companies, NGOs. Henry VIII had the monasteries to plunder; Trump has the Ivy League.

There is, of course, an opportunity here. Once you grasp Trump as an elected monarch, his full rebuke to the very idea of America comes into clearer view. He is precisely — almost uncannily — what this country was founded to oppose: an arbitrary, corrupt, mendacious, and utterly incompetent king. We need to repeatedly expose this king’s long train of abuses and usurpations, his unilateral cutting off trade with all parts of the world, his imposition of taxes, i.e. tariffs, without our consent, his transporting people in America beyond seas to jails in dictatorships from which there is no escape or reprieve. We need to insist that a president whose character is marked by every act which may define a tyrant be subjected once again to the Constitution.

And, yes, that document is still there — a living indictment of this man, this presidency, this moment. The Senate is still there if it is capable of asserting itself. They could shut this down tomorrow if a super-majority wanted to. And we the people are still here. Perhaps we have become so corrupted, so dumbed down, so bored, and so degenerately irrational that Franklin’s deep gloom about the longevity of republics is being borne out in our own time.

But we are still Americans — the heirs of Franklin and Madison and Hamilton, however unworthy we are of them. And we have a republic to restore.

New On The Dishcast: Evan Wolfson

Evan is an attorney, gay rights pioneer, and should be a household name for his contribution to civil rights. He founded and led Freedom to Marry — the campaign to win marriage until victory at the Supreme Court in 2015, when he shut it down. Today he “advises and assists diverse organizations, movements, and countries in adapting the lessons on how to win to other important causes.” We became friends very soon after my 1989 essay, “Here Comes The Groom,” and dedicated our lives and careers in the coming quarter century to change the law.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the early, fierce resistance to gay marriage by gay activists, and the “tectonic” breakthrough in Hawaii. That link also takes you to a bunch of dissent over my pod debate with Douglas Murray on Israel and deportations. We also hear from readers discussing the dismal state of the Democratic Party. Plus, Mike White claps back at critics and all the “bossy bottoms.”

Money Quotes For The Week

“The United States has a chance to do something that should have been done DECADES AGO. Don’t be Weak! Don’t be Stupid! Don’t be a PANICAN (A new party based on Weak and Stupid people!). Be Strong, Courageous, and Patient, and GREATNESS will be the result!” – Dear Leader.

“BREAKING: Trump comes out as a panican,” – Rikki Schlott, after the bond market caused Trump to cave.

“I don’t really care about my 401k today. … Not that I’m not at a point in my life when I should be worried about my 401k, because I am. But this is what I believe: I believe in this man,” – Jeanine Pirro, the 73-year-old Fox News host.

“No matter what happens they’ll pretend it worked,” – David Harsanyi.

“This was brilliantly executed by Donald Trump. Textbook, Art of the Deal,” – Bill Ackman. Amazing how one man can set fire to his own credibility in a few tweets.

“I am glad that Musk has reduced his original estimate from $2 trillion to $150 billion, but I’d love to see him adopt more epistemologically rigorous practices and explain why he’s had to cut his estimate by 90% and what he learned from getting this so badly wrong,” – Matt Yglesias.

Yglesias Award Nominees

“If this was Biden, and he did some sort of scheme like this, and he absolutely tanked the stock market, he would be getting crucified, and front of the line would be Trump,” – Dave Portnoy.

“I can name you a period in American history where there was a fairly large surplus in America’s balance of trade: the entire Great Depression,” – Ben Shapiro.

The View From Your Window

Lübeck, Germany, 1.20 pm

Dissent Of The Week: Why The Biden Bashing Now?

A reader writes:

Really? The week that Trump kills the American order of the past eight decades you have a column denouncing … Biden? Either you wrote that before “Liberation Day”, in which case it comes off as incredibly lazy; or it wasn’t, in which case the timing is so bizarre as to approach the deranged.

Yes, Biden fucked up terribly, and all his enablers did too. (I said so at the time, just like millions of other Democrats.) Yes, he deserves blame and scorn for what he did, and what he didn’t do. Nothing you said was WRONG.

But can we keep a sense of proportion here? The Republican Party, virtually all of it, has brought this country to ruin. Yes, the Democrats fucked up in their attempts to stop it. But Robert E Lee was a traitor who should have hanged, while George McClellan was simply a coward who should have been fired long before he was. Yes, if you’re Lincoln, you blame McClellan, since you could just REPLACE him. But any cold-eye view has to blame the Confederates first, second, and ten-thousandth.

So yeah, write this column … during a down week. If Trump ever gives you one.

I’ll write a column when I bloody well like it, thank you very much. And you are free not to read it or to cancel your subscription. And the fact that Trump will keep pumping up the horror surely means I can take time to note degeneracy among the Dems, especially when, in this case, it directly re-elected Trump. And, as you can see above, it’s not as if I am holding fire on the mad king.

Many more dissents — on Israel as well — are over on the pod page, arriving in your in-tray shortly. Please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

Two sets of twins cover a Black Sabbath song with harps and drums:

In The ‘Stacks

• Don’t miss the Dispatch editorial on the “dark hour for the American right.” Superb.
• Every day America edges closer to Juche.
• On tariffs, Trump pulled a Truss — except she quickly left the scene.
• Joe Klein sees through “the Artifice of the Deal.”
• The ghost of Herbert Hoover gloats.
• How are the tech stocks of the broligarchy doing now?
• The Dems are tongue-tied on tariffs.
• While everyone was glued to the markets, “an unprecedented number of B-2 bombers amassed for Iran strike.”
• The number of “nationwide injunctions” last century? 27. Against Trump? 79.
• Tim Noah writes, “Meet the man who’s displaced Musk as the most loathed member of Trump’s inner circle.”
• Can Ukrainian soldiers survive if Musk takes away Starlink?
• JT Morris covers a “free speech fight in Maine” — over a trans athlete.
• In Colorado, “misgendering” your kid could lose you custody.
• Jonathan Kay sizes up “the future of Canadian conservatism.”
• Tyler Cowen compares 17th century England to 21st century America. Buckle up, buckaroo.

The View From Your Window Contest

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“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” – Orwell