Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.
Donald Trump is pinning for 1776 again.
Trump’s nostalgia is not the patriotic “spirit of ‘76,” nor even the whitewashed version of US history presented in his first term’s “1776 Commission.” In fact, it has nothing to do with America’s 250th anniversary.
The president simply wants to reign like an eighteenth-century king.
Last Friday afternoon, I was recording a segment with Jake Tapper on CNN about my last column on The Next Move. I found myself waiting a while at the network’s studios; the news cycle had been overtaken by Trump’s decision to ban CNN and two other media platforms (MS NOW and Politico) from the White House grounds.
The affected outlets’ offense, in Trump’s words, was “their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!”
Would King George III be proud? In 1776, agents of the Crown could raid a newspaper’s offices for publishing critical commentary about the royal regime. The Stamp Act was imposed to smother America’s nascent free press in the cradle. Authorities in London charged publishers sympathetic to the rebels under Britain’s seditious libel laws.
Perhaps the jilted King George can find some relief from beyond the grave. Two and a half centuries after the American Revolution, the colonists—one colonist in particular—are finally coming home to the monarchical tradition.
Of course, not everyone understands King Trump’s wisdom in banning those upstart “fake-news” outlets. Let me amend that statement—evidently, no one understands. Not even Trump-friendly Fox and Trump-curious CBS are defending his press ban. Oh well; it was ever thus. They called George III “mad” too.
Will anyone challenge King Trump’s royal prerogative? Only if his opponents do not aspire to kingship themselves. The powers of the American president have long been described as “imperial”; members of both parties swept away concerns about this. They always assumed that the next king would be a good one.
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A Democratic presidential nominee could mobilize significant appeal among the masses if they were to run on a platform of limiting executive power.
They could return much of the spending, war-making, and diplomatic authority that have slid from Congress to the White House over the decades. They might commit to not rule by decree—or, if you prefer the American euphemism, “executive order.”
Maybe a future president would even support codifying that presidential communications must run through official channels: no monarchical musings on Truth Social or X.
King George would say that voluntarily ceding power cuts against human nature. When another George, Washington, was set to resign his military command and retire a victorious civilian, the king exclaimed disbelievingly that “if [Washington] does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
This takes me to the central question Americans confront in the person of their elected king. With a president playing the George III of 1776, can any American leader emulate his opposites, the men and women who defeated the Crown, those whom the king himself begrudgingly named “the greatest…in the world”?
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What to This Russian Is the Fourth of July?
The America of my Soviet upbringing was both distant and extremely close.
No kings in the U.S. period. End of story.
This is absolutely false and the comparison is ridiculous. At no point did George III ban the press, and in fact the press was more free in the Americas than it was in Europe. In fact the only restrictions on the press (until now) were from 1798-1801 under federalist aligned congress. I might consider signing up for paid if this website did not espouse the same silly myths that built the myth of American exceptionalism and the frontier myth. You may claim that you want to get racism out of schools, but even the centre left seems to buy into the same foundational myths that lead to racism, trumpism and foreign wars. What makes Americans so unable to deal with reality? Is it the terrible attrocities on which the American state was built?