The weakest possible rebuttal to the ‘No Kings’ criticism

Meghan McCain would just like someone to explain something to her.

A “nepo baby” (using her own words) born of American political royalty, McCain last week expressed bemusement at the then-looming “No Kings” protests against the Trump administration.

“I don’t understand how Trump is a King,” she wrote, “when he won every single swing state, the electoral college and popular vote in a democratic election.”

On Thursday, historian-turned-Fox-contributor Victor Davis Hanson took the idea one step further.

“So-called King, Donald Trump, ran in two contested Republican primaries,” his essay begins. “He ran three times in a general election. He was elected twice, and his party recently won a Republican Congress.”

From there, Hanson expands outward. Not only is the elected Trump not a king, he insists, but it’s Joe Biden (who, for example, “did not run a typical campaign” in 2020) and Democrats who have been engaged in king-like behavior. Biden’s “DOJ and FBI raided then-former-President Trump’s home”! His White House “helped coordinate 91 indictments” against Trump! That included charges following the Mar-a-Lago raid even though the FBI “found only 102 classified documents among some 14,000 seized”!

“A mere three days after Trump announced his reelection bid on November 15, 2022,” Hanson cries, “Jack Smith was coincidentally appointed special prosecutor of Trump.” Now that’s some king-ing!

But, of course, that appointment was the opposite of a coincidence. It occurred because Trump was running for president and the Justice Department wanted to separate its probe from the influence of the Biden administration. Many of Hanson’s other objections are equally dumb, a mix in which non-presidential actions are attributed to Biden through unmentioned intervening layers or simple presentations of right-wing frustrations as evidence to the point. He looks back over nearly 20 years, including events from the Obama administration, to present his case that “the left” are “the real kings” — a position that has not traditionally been held by collectives of individuals.

To gently explain to Hanson why Trump is being criticized for monarchical behavior, we don’t need to look back over 20 years. We can look back over 20 hours.

He unilaterally obliterated one of the three buildings that constitutes the White House, clearing space for a ballroom paid for by people and corporations looking to curry favor with his administration. He announced that, after talking with some of his friends, he wouldn’t dispatch soldiers to San Francisco in order to usurp that city’s self-governance — but he retained the right to do so in the future. He issued a pardon to a cryptocurrency executive who’d done business with the Trump family, continuing a chain of similar grants of clemency that rewarded his allies and supporters.

If you want a more fleshed out examination of Trump’s king-like actions, writer Julian Sanchez compiled a comparison of Trump’s second-term actions with the complaints against King George III that are articulated in the Declaration of Independence. The reasons the colonists gave for breaking with the British throne have numerous echoes with complaints about the Trump administration.

Of course, the “No Kings” protests aren’t really about monarchy, as such. They were given that name because Trump at one point earlier this year referred to himself as a king, inviting precisely the historical comparison that Sanchez articulates at length.

What’s actually at issue is Trump’s embrace of autocratic power. Monarchy is one flavor of that power, but it’s not really the one that Trump’s targeting. He doesn’t want to be a king; he wants to rule without checks on his power. He wants to do what he wants, to reward his friends and punish his foes, to dip into the government coffers and to make the White House literally his own. And millions of Americans don’t want him to do that.

So, yes, he won the 2024 presidential election, earning more votes than Kamala Harris and returning to the White House. But to imagine, as McCain and Hanson do, that this is the actual critique — that demonstrators are complaining that he is actually a king — is the most lightweight of straw men. It’s not that he gained power as an autocrat, it’s that he’s aggregating and deploying it as one.

It is obviously fraught to invoke events in Europe 90 years ago in conversations about American politics, in part because of the alacrity with which Trump and his allies suggest that any comparison with German fascism is an equation of Trump with Adolf Hitler. But the 1933 election in that country gets to McCain and Hanson’s point directly: The Nazi party gained power through the votes of German citizens. Hitler had already been appointed chancellor and he and his party “used existing laws to destroy German democracy and create a dictatorship,” as one history of the era puts it.

What followed began with voters operating within a democratic system. But that empowered someone hostile to democracy, who worked to coalesce power around himself instead. This is not to say that Trump’s trajectory will mirror Hitler’s. It is, instead, to say that there are examples from the historical record that make obvious why it’s hardly contradictory to suggest that a democratically elected leader might deserve criticism for steering his country away from democracy.

Someone who could attest to that directly is a Silver- and Bronze Star-winning submarine captain who served the U.S. Navy during the war to contain Germany and Japan’s fascist aggression eighty years ago. That would be John S. McCain Jr., Meghan’s grandfather.

Photo: A still from the AI-generated video Trump posted on Truth Social after last weekend’s No Kings rallies.