DOES AMERICA HAVE A KING
DOES AMERICA HAVE A KING?
Every President of the United States, including Trump, has recited and sworn to the Oath of Office as the official start of their presidency.
The oath is found in Article II of the Constitution. It only contains 35 words, as follows:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Trump swore this Oath of Office for the Office of President of the United States while he was holding the Bible. He swore he “will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
The Constitution f the United States calls for the president to be an elected position; not a king.
Trump bestowed on himself the monarchical moniker on Wednesday after proclaiming victory over New York’s new car-traffic toll plan for Manhattan. Trump posted on Truth Social: “LONG LIVE THE KING!” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich then posted on X a screenshot of Trump’s post, juxtaposed with an AI-generated image of Trump in a crown with the New York skyline behind him. Official White House social media accounts also quoted Trump’s post and shared an illustration of Trump in a crown, with “TRUMP” in place of a familiar-looking TIME magazine logo and the words: “Long Live the King.”
The TIME cover from 2018, in which Trump is illustrated to be looking in a mirror and seeing his reflection crowned, with the headline “King Me” and sub-headline “Visions of absolute power.”
Trump’s royal assertion has drawn a huge volume of criticism from public, the media, social networks and politicians, including from Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who said in a statement, “We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king.” She added that “New York hasn’t labored under a king in over 250 years. We sure as hell are not going to start now.” Rep. Don Beyer (D, Va.) echoed Hochul’s reminder: “We don’t have kings in the USA.” Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, reiterated Beyer’s words in his State of the State address, adding “my oath is to the Constitution of our state and our nation. We don’t have kings in America, and I won’t bend the knee to one.”
Some Trump defenders claim the posts are harmless trolling, but the idea of a dictator or a king should not be ignored by a person who called for the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capital which has termed as an insurrection. Claiming he is king violates the Oath of Office he swore to uphold as president.
Over the weekend, Trump posted a Napoleon-inspired statement suggesting he’s above the law. He’s repeatedly teased the unconstitutional idea of serving a third term (The Constitution allows only two terms). And in an interview alongside adviser Elon Musk that aired on Fox News on Feb. 18, Musk suggested—not for the first time—that Trump ought to have supreme authority, unrestricted by the courts. “If the will of the President is not implemented, and the President is representative of the people,” Musk said, “that means the will of the people is not being implemented, and that means we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.” Trump had stated earlier that he would be dictator on ‘one day” after he was president.
America’s Founding Fathers didn’t envision the U.S. as a bureaucracy or a democracy. They envisioned it as a republic—defined by James Madison as “a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior.”
A Constitutional Republic - which has lasted over 200 years.
The very principle that the country would not be ruled by an all-powerful king was foundational to the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed in the Constitution, the latter of which was hammered out during a contentious convention in 1787.
To be sure, not every Founding Father was against the idea of an authoritative executive branch leader. Some, including Alexander Hamilton, argued in favor of a single executive, rather than a group of people, which risked the “danger of difference of opinion,” as he wrote in the Federalist Papers. Others believed, as Edmund Randolph put it during debate, that a unitary executive would be “the fetus of monarchy.” The idea of a king died after that debate.
Amid public concerns that the drafters of the Constitution would create a monarchy, according to quoting one delegate of the 1787 Continental Congress who said: “Tho’ we cannot, affirmatively, tell you what we are doing, we can, negatively, tell you what we are not doing—we never once thought of a king.” (recorded minutes, 1787 Continental Congress.)
The Constitution that resulted outlined a separation of powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, serving together as a system of checks and balances to prevent the kind of tyrannical rule that the colonies fought to free themselves from.
Thomas Paine had written in Common Sense in 1776: “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” The Founders decided on an elected government, divided into three separate equal branches with checks and balances, to ensure there would not be a monarchy (king.)
There were many issues where the founders disagreed, but this was not one of them, the consensus of the framers of the Constitution was that a President would not be effectively made “an elected king.”
“The American solution,” is “an executive strong enough to be effective but checked enough to prevent tyranny.” But even the Founders realized that such a solution “remains unfortunately dependent to some degree on the character of the President and the electorate that supports him.” (recorded minutes, 1787 Continental Congress .)
When Benjamin Franklin, who was in favor of a king, was asked on the last day of the convention in 1787 whether the delegates had created a monarchy or a republic, Franklin famously responded: “a republic, if you can keep it.”
In 1814, John Adams, by then a former President, wrote that unchecked democracy can be just as pernicious as monarchy and “never lasts long.” “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy.”
“Absolute power intoxicates alike despots, monarchs, aristocrats, and democrats,” Adams also wrote, warning that dissatisfaction with the state of government could give rise to a democratic public yearning for a strongman. “They soon cry, ‘this will not do; we have gone too far! We are all in the wrong! We are none of us safe! We must unite in some clever fellow, who can protect us all—Caesar, [Napoleon] Bonaparte, who you will! Though we distrust, hate, and abhor them all; yet we must submit to one or another of them, stand by him, cry him up to the skies, and swear that he is the greatest, best, and finest man that ever lived!’”
In the end, this is what Trump is after, his end game. That cannot happen.
February 21, 2025 JAMES L. BELL THE BELL LAW FIRM, P. A. P.O. BOX 778 CHARLESTON, S.C. 29402 1-305-307-1345 1-843-608-4576 [email protected]