What the Founding Fathers Said About Kings

President Donald Trump has a fondness for giving himself nicknames: “very stable genius,” “Honest Don,” and now “the king.”

The latest title gives critics the most pause.

Trump bestowed on himself the monarchical moniker on Wednesday after proclaiming victory over New York’s new car-traffic toll plan for Manhattan. Trump posted on Truth Social: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich then posted on X a screenshot of Trump’s post, juxtaposed with an AI-generated image of Trump in a crown with the New York skyline behind him. Official White House social media accounts also quoted Trump’s post and shared an illustration of Trump in a crown, with “TRUMP” in place of a familiar-looking magazine logo and the words: “Long Live the King.”

The image resembles an actual TIME cover from 2018, in which Trump is illustrated to be looking in a mirror and seeing his reflection crowned, with the headline “King Me” and sub-headline “Visions of absolute power.”

Trump’s royal assertion has drawn criticism, including from Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who said in a statement, “We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king.” She added that “New York hasn’t labored under a king in over 250 years. We sure as hell are not going to start now.” Rep. Don Beyer (D, Va.) echoed Hochul’s reminder: “We don’t have kings in the USA.” Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, also a Democrat, reiterated Beyer’s words in his State of the State address, adding “my oath is to the Constitution of our state and our nation. We don’t have kings in America, and I won’t bend the knee to one.”

Some Trump defenders claim the posts are harmless trolling, a reference flown over liberals’ heads. “I’m going to be the king of New York real estate,” Trump told his peers when he was in college, a classmate recalled to the Boston Globe in 2018. “He used to think he was the king of New York,” former Trump Organization executive Barbara Res told the New York Daily News in 2021. “The king of New York is back to reclaim the city that he built,” Donald Trump Jr. announced last year when his father held a rally at Madison Square Garden.

Over the weekend, Trump posted a Napoleon-inspired statement suggesting he’s above the law. He’s repeatedly teased the unconstitutional idea of serving a third term. And in an interview alongside adviser Elon Musk that aired on Fox News on Feb. 18, Musk suggested—not for the first time—that Trump ought to have supreme authority, unrestricted by the courts. “If the will of the President is not implemented, and the President is representative of the people,” Musk said, “that means the will of the people is not being implemented, and that means we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.”

America’s Founding Fathers didn’t envision the U.S. as a bureaucracy or a democracy. They envisioned it as a republic—defined by James Madison as “a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior.”

The very principle that the country would not be ruled by an all-powerful king was foundational to the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed in the Constitution, the latter of which was hammered out during a contentious convention in 1787.

To be sure, not every Founding Father was against the idea of an authoritative executive branch leader. Some, including Alexander Hamilton, argued in favor of a single executive, rather than a group of people, which risked the “danger of difference of opinion,” as he wrote in the Federalist Papers. Others believed, as Edmund Randolph put it during debate, that a unitary executive would be “the fetus of monarchy.”

Amid public concerns that the crafters of the Constitution would create a monarchy, according to the University of Houston’s Digital History Project, a Philadelphia newspaper reported on the negotiations, quoting a delegate, who said: “Tho’ we cannot, affirmatively, tell you what we are doing, we can, negatively, tell you what we are not doing—we never once thought of a king.”

The Constitution that resulted outlined a separation of powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, serving together as a system of checks and balances to prevent the kind of tyrannical rule that the colonies fought to free themselves from.

Thomas Paine had written in Common Sense in 1776: “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” 

“There were so many issues where the founders disagreed, but this was not one of them,” historian Holly Brewer told ABC News last year of the consensus that a President would not be effectively made “an elected king.”

“The American solution,” summarized writer Richard Hurowitz in an essay for TIME in 2018, was “an executive strong enough to be effective but checked enough to prevent tyranny.” But even the Founders realized that such a solution, as Hurowitz put it, “remains unfortunately dependent to some degree on the character of the President and the electorate that supports him.”

When Benjamin Franklin was asked on the last day of the convention in 1787 whether the delegates had created a monarchy or a republic, Franklin famously responded: “a republic, if you can keep it.”

In 1814, John Adams, by then a former President, wrote that unchecked democracy can be just as pernicious as monarchy and “never lasts long.” “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy.”

“Absolute power intoxicates alike despots, monarchs, aristocrats, and democrats,” Adams also wrote, warning that dissatisfaction with the state of government could give rise to a democratic public yearning for a strongman. “They soon cry, ‘this will not do; we have gone too far! We are all in the wrong! We are none of us safe! We must unite in some clever fellow, who can protect us all—Caesar, [Napoleon] Bonaparte, who you will! Though we distrust, hate, and abhor them all; yet we must submit to one or another of them, stand by him, cry him up to the skies, and swear that he is the greatest, best, and finest man that ever lived!’”

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