No Kings Day rally, Minnesota State Capitol building, Saint Paul, Minnesota. Photo by Myotus, Wiki Commons
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It will be blue states and the people who live in them who suffer most greatly from Trump’s “I’m the king, and I’ll do what I want” approach to governing.
This is how pissed off the Founders were after the Boston Tea Party in 1773 resulted in the passage of the so-called Coercive Acts by the British Parliament: The Founders wrote their anger into the words of the Third Amendment, which banned the “quartering” of soldiers in the homes of citizens without the “consent of the owner.”
That was because the British Coercive Acts, along with limiting the self-governance of Massachusetts and closing Boston Harbor until the cost of the tea destroyed during the Tea Party was repaid, allowed British soldiers to be quartered in the homes of colonial citizens.
The Boston Tea Party famously protested “taxation without representation,” and that is exactly what is going on 252 years later in 2025. Donald Trump did us the favor of spelling out his intention to act in the manner of King George at his “Salute to America” event in Iowa last Thursday. The Hill described the event in Iowa as having “formally kicked off a yearlong celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States’s founding.” Trump got the whole “founding” thing upside down and backwards, of course, when he told his adoring crowd, “All of the things we did with the tax cuts and rebuilding our military, not one Democrat voted for us. But of all the things that we’ve given, and they wouldn’t vote. Only because they hate Trump. But I hate them, too. You know that? I really do, I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country.”
Those are not the words of a president elected by the free people of a democratic nation. They are the words of despotic monarch who believes he can pick and choose his subjects and whom he will reward for their loyalty. In that speech in Iowa, he told the nation that he is the president of Republicans, not Democrats; of red states, not blue ones.
The people who pay their taxes in red states will get back at least some of what they have given the federal government in taxes in the form of disaster relief, defense contracts, and research grants to their state and private universities. The universities in blue states will have their research grants denied, unless they cave in to Trump’s royal demands that they hire conservatives and change the curriculum of what they teach to omit subjects like Black and women’s history and other “woke” subjects the king doesn’t like. He’ll figure out a way to make good on the infrastructure money to repair roads and bridges and modernize airports in Alabama and Arkansas and Texas, while denying the same funds to Illinois and Massachusetts and New York and California.
The king’s Big Bullshit Bill will make the Medicare and Medicaid programs more difficult to access for the people who paid their hard-earned money in payroll taxes to fund Medicare, and paid state and federal income and sales taxes to fund Medicaid. Everyone will suffer.
But, it will be blue states and the people who live in them who suffer most greatly from Trump’s “I’m the king, and I’ll do what I want” approach to governing. Blue state citizens, Republican and Democrats alike, pay their federal taxes in the form of payroll and income taxes, yet Trump, by swearing his hatred of Democrats, has told us exactly what he will do for the states where most of them reside: as little as possible. He has even had his Attorney General, the odious bootlicker Pam Bondi, provide him with a legal theory that he can ignore laws that interfere with his “constitutional duties” and “core powers” as president. Additionally, according to the American Bar Association Journal, Trump has read the Supreme Court’s immunity decision as giving him the “constitutional power to immunize private parties to commit what would be illegal acts without legal jeopardy,” a reading of the law the New York Times called “his starkest power grab.”
The ABA and the Times are wasting their time analyzing what Donald Trump is doing. A “power grab” assumes that Trump is claiming or exercising powers he does not have. Trump isn’t grabbing power. He’s using powers that he has already taken. He completely shut down and ended an entire government department, USAID, formed and funded by an act of Congress, without even a sentence of legal justification for his action. He just did it. USAID and its aid programs were there one day, headquartered in a building with its name in brass letters above the front door. The next day, its desks were empty, its employees sent home, its funding ended and redirected. Last week, it was announced that the FBI will move from its current headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover building into the old USAID building.
There is no legal authority for the president to close down USAID, fire its employees and cancel all its funding and move another department into its building. Acting like a monarch, however, Trump has done it.
I struggled for the last couple of days to analogize the situation we find ourselves in. My first instinct was to see Trump’s statement of hate for Democrats as a kind of secession forced upon blue states. In effect, he is saying, you hate me, so I am not your president. I am president of red states and Republicans who love me. But blue states have not seceded, either voluntarily or by force. The problem we face is that we are paying our dues as citizens to a club that has banned us from membership. It is a club that Democrats increasingly do not want to belong to, but without recourse to the power of our votes until November of next year, we are stuck.
Our citizenship is diminished. Trump has told us that we are denizens of a country to which we do not belong. Hearing much the same from another king 252 years ago, a rebellion was born.
Now it is up to us again.
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
You can read Lucian Truscott's daily articles at luciantruscott.substack.com. We encourage our readers to get a subscription.
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