Last week, Trump posted a fake Time magazine cover picturing himself wearing a crown and a smug grin with the proclamation, “LONG LIVE THE KING!”
I can hear his supporters chuckling about Trump’s love of trolling and “owning the libs.” If only that were all it was.
A couple of days earlier, Trump posted, “He who saves his Country does not violate any law,” a quote attributed to the 19th-century French emperor and dictator Napoleon.
That’s not exactly the Founding Fathers, who went to war to free Americans from the rule of kings.
But Trump and the MAGA movement have basically abandoned any commitment to constitutional democracy. They have cheered as he has brazenly broken the law and undermined our national security by allowing Elon Musk and his wrecking crew to pillage crucial computer systems and access Americans’ most sensitive private information.
One of Trump’s recent executive orders gives White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, an architect of Project 2025, the power to block federal spending approved by Congress, in violation of the law and in defiance of Supreme Court rulings.
The aggressive abuse of power by Trump and his advisors has been enabled by the failure of congressional Republicans to fulfill their constitutional obligation to defend the Constitution and act as a check on a rogue president.
Some of Trump’s actions have been put on hold by federal courts, which is fueling the Trump team’s resentment at having to follow the law. When judges started questioning flagrant lawbreaking overseen by Musk, Vice President JD Vance took to X to claim, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
Vance may have skipped some constitutional law classes, because he is missing a keystone of our constitutional system of checks and balances. It is the courts’ responsibility and duty to determine whether the executive’s exercise of power is legitimate. That is precisely how they rein in a lawless executive branch.
This is nothing new for Vance, whose short political career has been nurtured by billionaires and far-right intellectuals who have rejected democracy and long for an American Caesar to impose their view of an ideal society on the rest of the country.
That may be why Trump chose Vance, who said before the election that Trump should fire every civil servant and defy the Supreme Court if it tried to stop him.
It seems likely that Trump’s recent posts are about preparing his supporters — and the shamelessly submissive Republicans in Congress — to support him if and when he decides to take the advice of his anti-democratic vice president and simply ignore court rulings he disagrees with.
Which brings us back to the question: Who made Trump king?
I nominate Chief Justice John Roberts, who led the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority in cooking up a theory of presidential immunity that would have shocked the founding fathers.
They essentially gave Trump a green light to ignore the law at will by ruling that courts cannot hold him responsible for law-breaking done in carrying out his presidential responsibilities.
Justice Sotomayor saw it coming, warning in a dissent, “The president is now a king above the law.” She concluded, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”
Justice Jackson wrote that the MAGA-minded majority discarded the principle that no one is above the law, a principle that “has long prevented our Nation from devolving into despotism.”
The “practical consequences” of the majority decision “are a five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance and the normal operations of our Government,” Justice Jackson warned.
In a bit of writing that will undoubtedly enter the Hall of Fame of Things That Did Not Age Well, Chief Justice Roberts dismissed those warnings as “fearmongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals.”
Justice Roberts, meet Trump, Vance and Musk.
Fifty years ago, Richard Nixon declared after he had resigned as president that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” But during the Watergate crisis, many Republicans in Congress and a unanimous Supreme Court rejected the idea that the president is king.
We have, unfortunately, come a long way from that consensus. But we are only one month into Trump’s term. It is not too late for congressional Republicans to reject his threats and intimidation and remind themselves of their oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
If they can’t do that, if they aren’t willing to stand up to the president who would be king, they should really stop talking about 1776 or describing themselves as patriots.
Svante Myrick is the president of People For the American Way.
