King Donald I and the rebirth of a nation

Jan. 20 was fixed as Inauguration Day in 1937, when Franklin Roosevelt entered his second term as president of the United States. Twenty inaugurations of 12 presidents have been performed on that day or the following Monday when the 20th was a Sunday. That was then. Jan. 20, 2017 is a date which will live in infamy, as FDR might have put it. Well, at least it’ll live in alternatively factual history. Because on that day, the world’s second oldest surviving republic, the United States of America, became a monarchy. On Jan. 20, Donald J. Trump took the oath of office and nominally became the 45th president of the United States. But in reality he became King Donald I of America and thus established the royal Trump dynasty. The non-royal Trump dynasty had been established with rather less fanfare about seven decades ago by King Donald’s father, Fred, who evidently was perfectly happy being a very wealthy commoner.

The White House is now Trump Palace D.C. and must be the smallest and least glitzy of the several Trump Palaces. King Donald’s palace retainers genuflect to Steve Bannon, who serves as both lord chancellor and court wizard. The most visible functionaries of the royal household are court jesters Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway, and the king’s smug fool, Sebastian Gorka.

There are more filthy rich people in King Donald’s privy council than in any cabinet in the history of the republic, a clear indication of the interests, priorities and anti-populist direction of the nascent monarchy.

And does anyone really believe that any of the plutocratic privy councilors’ allegedly blind trusts are any less under their effective control than King Donald’s ongoing conflicted interests remain under his? Or that we’ll ever see the king’s recent personal tax returns? Or that he didn’t order the news-unworthy “leak” of his 2005 1040 first page, such as it may be?

One is reluctant to call a reigning monarch an impenitent bully or thug. But His Majesty Donald Trump has usually been able to get his way by whatever means are convenient and advantageous to himself, all others be damned. To King Donald, laws are what he says they are. What he doesn’t like, he simply ignores. Or lies about. Or insults. He defers to the Constitution only when it suits him.

Assuming primogeniture obtains, King Donald’s eldest son, Donald Jr., will in time succeed his father as King Donald II. One wonders whether King Donald I’s reign will end by abdication, overthrow, palace coup, mutiny, assassination, natural death, impeachment, or simply by general election.

Our Founding Fathers knew precisely what they were doing when they went to great pains to give us a sustainable, ongoing republic, a nation built on laws. That’s what the Constitution is all about, after all: a republic on democratic principles, not a democracy on republican principles, not a monarchy on any principles.

Then Donald J. Trump came along. As with most other successful politicians, his negatives were well-known but evidently overlooked by enough voters to get him elected; and he always has been famously full of himself.

King Donald obviously loves to hear himself grandstand and purposively sharp-shoots from an orifice other than his mouth. The nabob of narcissism lies so incorrigibly and naturally that he may not even realize it.

The gaggle of sorry presidential candidates throughout 2015 and 2016 pretty well eliminated themselves from the competition; they didn’t need help from Trump’s mercenaries. But even though his self-proclaimed “massive landslide” victory in November was actually an electoral-vote close-call and popular-vote loss, Mr. Trump nevertheless surprised, amazed, shocked everyone by getting himself elected president.

And then, like Napoleon, he crowned himself king.

To be sure, the nation could in theory be made over as a western-style constitutional monarchy on democratic principles, like the United Kingdom, where the sovereign is pretty much a figurehead, useful for ceremonies, tourism, appearing on stamps and money, and little else. Well, there’s always scandal.

While his personal life shouldn’t be held to a different— read higher—standard than that of any other lustful, egomaniacal politician, Trump is more likely to be an oriental-style autocrat, a tyrant—and not a benevolent despot, judging by his four decades of questionable business and charity practices. Not to mention his unyielding king-can-do-no-wrong attitude. Sovereign immunity in spades.

How could anyone ever have doubted that King Donald the boastful plutocrat, despite all his populist posturing, would throw the masses that wanted, needed to believe in him under the bus and dedicate himself to the service of really big business and mega moguls—and especially himself?

But at least we can be grateful that the most hyperbolically superlative monarch ever to have promised to drain a symbolic swamp and build a just plain stupid wall has saved us from another reign of Clinton slime.