Opinion | It Was Inevitable That Trump Would Come to This

To commit lèse-majesté was, and in some places still is, to commit an offense against dignity of the crown.

The basic idea was that under a monarch, and especially an absolute monarch, the integrity of the state rested on the stature of the king (or queen or equivalent figure). To insult or denigrate or even question the monarch was to undermine the state itself. In the absolutist states of medieval and early modern Europe, lèse-majesté was a high crime, punishable by death.

It is a little difficult to imagine lèse-majesté here in the United States, where we have a long and raucous tradition of political mockery and open contempt for our elected leaders, protected by our constitutional right to free expression. It matters too, on that point, that even the highest officials in our government owe their power to the people and not the heritage of blood or divine right.

How fitting then that under Donald Trump, a president with monarchical pretensions, the United States is getting a sharp taste of what it is like when the ruler’s name is inviolate.

It is practically cliché at this point to observe that President Trump is jealous of the trappings of monarchy. He has draped the Oval Office in gold, gilded the statues and monuments that mark the landscape of Washington D.C., pledged to build an enormous triumphal arch in his name and destroyed a large part of the White House to build an opulent presidential ballroom of immense size.

As to the actual substance of his administration, Trump’s almost exclusive use of executive orders is tied up in his monarchical understanding of presidential power. The executive order, as he understands it, is less an interoffice memo with defined legal scope than it is a royal decree to be swiftly obeyed, without question or challenge.

That is one reason those orders cover vast territory, much of it beyond the president’s formal power or authority. His executive orders have sought to end diversity programs throughout the country, change school curriculums at the district level, commandeer state voting systems and rewrite the Constitution to limit the scope of citizenship. The ambition of these orders is a testament to Trump’s self-understanding as a man of limitless power. It is not for nothing that in February 2025, a little less than a month after many of these executive orders were issued, the official White House account on X shared an A.I.-generated image of Trump as monarch with the caption reading in part, “Long Live the King.”

In their book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” my news-side colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan recount a meeting with Trump during which he proudly showed them a doblockent, written by a golf caddy and businessman, that claimed he was a more powerful figure than a host of notorious dictators and warlords, including Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.

Trump relished the comparison.

With all of this noted, it is appropriate that King Trump, first of his name, would also seek to use the force of the state to punish those who question him, insult him or challenge his narrative of events — lèse-majesté, American-style.

Trump has filed lawsuits against a number of news organizations, including ABC, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. In each case he claims he’s been defamed, but nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that he demands fealty to his vision of reality and that if you will not accept it, he will try to impose it.

His most recent target is the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, which he has threatened with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit over a recent report that criticized and condemned his deployment of the National Guard in American cities.

Trump claimed to send the Guard to cities such as Washington to address crime. But according to the center’s report, there is no statistically significant evidence that these deployments — which will cost more than $1.7 billion if they continue through the end of 2026 — have reduced crime across the country. The point of the deployments, the authors argue, was not to deal with crime but to intimidate and seize power from Democratic-led cities. The president’s lawyer called the report malicious and full of false statements.

Whether or not you agree with the report’s conclusions, an attack on the president’s policies is not an attack on the president’s person. Even if it were, the price of being a public official is that you are open to a wide range of critique. If that is unacceptable, you can always resign.

To be fair to Trump, it is true that no president has ever liked that part of the job. And there have been times when presidents have tried to turn the apparatus of the state against their critics, under the cover of the national interest. But most presidents have taken their lumps and moved on, knowing that there wasn’t much they could do in a nation defined by its broad commitment to free speech and a free press.

Trump, though, does not see himself as a mere president subject to the public’s opinion. And he doesn’t see his office as separate from himself. He really does see himself as something like a monarch, whose government is undermined and threatened by open criticism from ordinary citizens, even as he claims to speak for the “forgotten” man and to channel the general will.

This sense of royal injury extends beyond Trump’s relationship to his political opponents. You see it too in the way he deals with other countries — the way he treats anything short of total submission as an injury to him and thus an injury to the state.

Consider the president’s trade war with Canada, one of our closest economic partners. There is no logical reason for this conflict, and it does not serve the interest of people on either side of the border. It is principally a function of Trump’s boundless ego and his monomaniacal obsession with tariffs as the path to national prosperity.

For more than a year, Trump has tried to bully Canada into economic submission with tariffs, threats of tariffs and attacks on Canadian sovereignty, with regular and routine quips about making Canada the 51st state. This carried over into recent trade negotiations, in which the administration pressured Canada both to relinquish control over important aspects of its own trade policy and end support for industries harmed by American tariffs. When Canadian negotiators refused to bend to those demands and talks collapsed, Trump lashed out.

“Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years,” he raged on Truth Social. “On Trade, and in other ways, also, they are among the worst Nations in the World to deal with. They feel entitled, and yet, WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” To punish Canada for refusing him, Trump announced new 50 percent tariffs on “all Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and steel.”

And so here we are, locked in a destructive trade war with a neighbor that was once an ally and friend, but that now sees the United States as dangerous and untrustworthy.

The fatal flaw of monarchy is that the strength of the state depends on the personality and capacities of the monarch. It subjects an entire people to the pathologies of that one man or woman: to his dysfunctions, his maladaptations and his twisted sense of self.

Trump was democratically elected. But both his unilateral exercise of authority and his monarchical aspirations are reminders, at the very least, that putting this much power in the hands of one man — in the hands of one ego — is a reliable way to produce disaster.