Back When Patriots Opposed Kings

Last Saturday marked the 250th anniversary of the “shot heard round the world,” the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which can be more accurately described as a running fight that ranged 12 miles from Concord back to Boston. The action at Lexington wasn’t really a battle at all.

In the past, I’ve described how I grew up as a history nerd. One of my favorite books described the long fight between the British regulars and colonial militia on April 19, 1775. I don’t remember the name of that particular young reader’s volume, but if you’re interested in Revolutionary War history, my favorite historian, Rick Atkinson, has a great description of the battle in “The British Are Coming,” the first volume of his Revolutionary War trilogy. (I’ll add that you probably have to be a history nerd to have a favorite historian.)

As an adult, I’ve had the opportunity to visit this hallowed ground many times (in addition to touring the battlefield on a family vacation as a kid). One of the general aviation gateways to Boston is the Bedford-Hanscom airport, which sits adjacent to Lexington and Concord. (The airport is also the home of Hanscom AFB, the duty station of Jake Teixeira, an Air National Guard airman who was recently sentenced to 15 years in prison for leaking classified documents on a Minecraft game server in 2023. Insert your own Pete Hegspeth comment here.) On layovers, I’ve had the chance to walk portions of the Battle Road as well as to visit sites like Old North Church in Boston Proper. The area is beautiful in the fall, but it was in the springtime when it gave birth to a new nation.

Patriots Day is the annual holiday that commemorates the long battle from 1775, and the celebrations this year (which I was not in attendance for) made me ponder how much of America has come full circle in the last 250 years. It is pretty well documented that most of the colonists in 1775 were not advocates for independence. Instead, they saw themselves as Englishmen and subjects of the king who just wanted better representation in parliament. The Declaration of Independence did not come until more than a year later.

Paul Revere’s warning was not “The British are coming” because the colonists thought of themselves as British. It is more likely that he cried, “The regulars are coming!”

The irony is that these days, self-described “patriots” are likely to be supporters of a de facto king. Donald Trump’s style of governance is more akin to a royal monarch than the president of a democratic constitutional republic.

Consider that in only three months in office, Trump has already checked four boxes on the list of transgressions that our forefathers held against King George. The Declaration of Independence contains a laundry list of pet peeves that the patriots of 1776 believed were sufficient grounds for a “national divorce,” including:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences;

It is very ironic then that Donald Trump’s major policies include unilaterally erecting trade barriers that isolate modern America from world trade, unilaterally imposing tariffs on international trade without the consent of the governed, subjecting immigrants to indefinite detention without due process, and contracting that detention out to a brutal prison in a foreign country without criminal charges. As Merrie Soltis recently pointed out in The Racket News, the president has broad authority to deport immigrants, but this isn’t deportation. This is long-term confinement without a trial or even an indictment.

If you listen to right-wing pundits these days, you’ll see a lot of them attacking due process. The vice president claimed on the platform formerly known as Twitter that noncitizens are not entitled to due process. Stephen Miller, now the Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor, has made the same argument.

In contrast, due process and the right to trial were so important to our founding fathers that John Adams represented the Redcoat soldiers who were charged with murder in the Boston Massacre. Adams got the British commander and six of eight soldiers involved acquitted. The final two were convicted on the reduced charge of manslaughter.

The Trump Administration takes the opposite tack. Rather than presuming that defendants are innocent, the Administration asks us to presume that all deportees prisoners are guilty of violent crimes, even though many of them have never even been charged with anything other than illegal entry into the United States. How likely is it that active gang members would have never run afoul of the police?

Even more problematic, Trump has called for deporting and imprisoning US citizens in El Salvador. With the Trump Administration investigating political opponents and threatening them with criminal prosecution for opposing the president and the erosion of due process, it is becoming a shorter jump to the possibility that Americans could be arrested for political speech and locked up indefinitely in a Salvadoran prison. We aren’t there yet, but it seems that only the courts stand between Donald Trump and the roundup of political prisoners.

And MAGA Republicans are attacking the courts. Congressional Republicans have threatened to impeach judges who stand in the way of Trump’s agenda, while some are calling on the Administration to ignore the courts. Jesse Kelly posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter, “Ignore the Supreme Court. Arrest anyone who tries to enforce this. Dissolve the Supreme Court entirely if they push.” Similarly, Sean Davis of The Federalist, once a serious conservative publication, posted, “If the Supreme Court is going to ignore the law and the Constitution, then the president is obligated to ignore the Supreme Court and put it in its place.”

The courts are a thin black line separating our constitutional order from lawless authoritarianism and a great many self-described patriots are urging tht the president erase the line and effectively become a king.

Trump is already ruling like a monarch rather than a president. In three months, the would-be king has issued 124 Executive Orders but signed only five bills. While there is nothing inherently wrong with Executive Orders, many of Trump’s orders resemble royal decrees that remake large sections of the federal government and contradict existing law. One of the most egregious abuses of presidential authority is Trump’s attempt to overturn the established constitutional precedent of birthright citizenship, an Executive Order that is headed to the Supreme Court.

Trump’s overuse and abuse of executive power should not surprise anyone. For years, Trump has claimed that Article II of the Constitution gives him the power to do “whatever I want.” That isn’t the case (although it is much closer to the truth after the Supreme Court gave presidents overly broad immunity for “official acts” in 2024), and presidents are still subject to the law rather than Americans being subjects of the president.

In the past, Republicans have criticized the abuses of power by past presidents such as Woodrow Wilson, who built a quasi police state and locked up political opponents, or FDR, who attacked the Supreme Court as directly as any president ever has. The current crop of Republicans seem to look to these dark chapters of American history as inspiration rather than as cautionary tales.

In another tweet, Jesse Kelly said the quiet part out loud.

“Donald Trump is the last thing before we get a dictator,” he wrote. “I wonder if he knows this. Not a left-wing dictator either. The Right will demand a dictator if Trump is not allowed to implement the will of the voters. And they will get one.”

I wonder if he has the self-awareness to know that he is essentially calling on Donald Trump to take the steps to become a dictator while simultaneously warning that a dictator could arise if Trump fails. I really don’t think he does.

I do agree that a large part of the right is ready for a benevolent-in-their-eyes strongman, however. I think the same thing about parts of the left after watching the adoration of Obama, whose “pen and phone” paved the way for Trump’s executive abuses and circumvention of Congress. Regardless, Republicans got there first, and Trump is openly talking about a third term or even a president-for-life.

Of all the smart things that the founders did, the smartest was tapping George Washington to head the Continental Army and then electing him as our first president. Many revolutions have become dictatorships when leaders come to like the taste of power and find its sweet flavor to be irresistible. Washington did what few other men would have done in that situation when we refused to hang onto power and retired voluntarily to Mount Vernon.

Few presidents have lived up to Washington’s example, and I certainly don’t expect Trump to do so. Knowing that, we need patriots in the mold of the Founding Fathers who will hold presidents accountable rather than encouraging and abetting their power grabs.