“We’re not a king. We’re not a king,” said President Donald Trump, speaking to news reporters at the White House on June 12.
It was his best line of the day. If it was intentional, it was a more subtle piece of media trolling than we are used to from the president.
For Trump was using the plural, the royal “we” to deny the Left’s latest suggestion, which is that he wants to be an absolute monarch to exercise autocratic power.
In response to Trump’s line, let me adapt well-known royal words for myself: “We were amused.”
Queen Victoria is supposed to have turned icily on a courtier who told a risqué story and said, “We are not amused.” Monarchs use the plural — “our government,” “we have decided,” etc. — on formal occasions. Speaking to their young children, they probably don’t say, “You may approach us,” but you never know.
The subject of kings came up at Trump’s press conference because he was asked what he hoped people would take away from the June 14 Flag Day military parade, with tanks rolling through the streets of Washington.
A left-wing group called No Kings organized hundreds of protests across the country to coincide with the parade because its founders believe, or say they believe, that the purpose of Trump’s military show is to glorify him rather than, as officially stated, to honor the military.
The timing of the parade is a gift to the complainers because June 14 is not just Flag Day and exactly 250 years to the day since the Continental Army was formed in 1775, but it is also the president’s 79th birthday. The No Kings website proclaims, “We’re not gathering to feed his ego. … We’re showing up everywhere he isn’t — to say no thrones, no crowns, no kings.”
This BS about King Don is a variation on the anti-Trump theme that he intends to run for a third term, stay in office, etc. Other examples of the genre are everywhere, especially now that the administration is (democratically) keeping the president’s campaign promise to deport illegal immigrants in large numbers. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, for example, responded to recent immigration enforcement actions by calling Trump a “monster” and a “tyrant.”
Trump has a taste for gilt, but there is not much else monarchical about him, and he has a surer common touch than perhaps any previous president in living memory. Whatever his detractors think he thinks, he does not seem to regard himself as our sovereign lord.
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Musing at the press conference on the allegations of his anti-monarchist opponents, he said, “I don’t feel like a king. I have to go through hell to get stuff approved. … A king wouldn’t have to call up [Speaker] Mike Johnson and [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune and say, ‘Fellas, ya gotta pull this off,’ and after years, we get it done. No, no, we’re not a king. We’re not a king at all.”
As with so many things left-wingers say, when they call Trump a would-be king, they’re projecting their own inclination to dictate how we live, what we say, and what we think. They’re the absolutists, not Trump. And at the moment, they are absolutely lost.