The King’s New Body

For all the baseball caps and bikers, fast food and talk of “a movement” Trump is no populist and certainly no man of the people. Academic and journalistic apprehensions over “populism” in Europe and the Americas, with their imperfectly concealed hatred of democracy, miss the point. This is no populist regime. This regime has authoritarian ambitions. Trump does not want to be the Kingfish. Trump wants to be king.

Trump’s monarchical style was recognized immediately by the makers of memes. Rebecca Schoenkopf wrote on wonkette, “all heil we mean hail the king” in “Gracious Man-King Donald Trump Will Not Lock Up Political Rival, For Emails” http://wonkette.com/608795/gracious-man-king-donald-trump-will-not-lock-up-political-rival-for-emails#X6ccFsBuFpYkb1w1.99¹ Demented Wallaby drew a brooding gothic monarch https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/47e4ye/king_trump_wallpaper_1440p/² Several commentators went from King to Emperor, appropriating Ingres’s portrait of Napoleon “on his imperial throne” http://blog.jim.com/images/trump_the_king_sm.jpg³ Nonsmokingladybug, referring textually to Dr. Seuss and visually to Ingres, wrote “I look at Donald Trump, the Billionaire, who is trying to bully himself into being the next President of the United States of America and all I see is a wanna be King, who’s pond got too small, who now wants it all.”

A more satirical version (I think—it grows ever more difficult to tell the ironic from the uninflected) comes from Jim at blog.jim.com who described how Trump could follow the example of Duterte to become King.

So for Trump to become King in substance, and eventually King in name, he has to seize the power to fire the fireproof. Which, given that he has support from the military, the praetorians, the cops, the rentacops, and the mercenaries, and that judges do not have much support from anyone, is quite doable…. if Trump exercises the power of Kings and does so competently and bravely, if he is worthy to exercise such power, Kings shall in due course ensue. I will then apply for the job of Grand Inquisitor when the time is right.⁴

Ratchetdude231, located in “Mother Russia” submitted “All Hail King Trump the future ruler of the 7 continents and leader of the free world” http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/all-hail-king-trump.454714580/ The New Yorker illustrated the “Legend of the Donald” with a portrait caught somewhere between military dictator and nineteenth century monarch http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/the-legend-of-the-donald Matt Laslo asks in the Daily Beast, “Is Trump King of Capitol Hill?”⁵ David Brooks writes, more pointedly “this administration is more like a medieval monarchy than a modern nation state.”⁶

References to Presidents as Kings are common enough to pass by easily. The specter of tyrannical kingship still walks in the memories of once-rebellious British colonies. To call a President a King is to suggest that he has gone beyond his proper role, and like George Hanover, ought to be resisted. Nearly every president has been castigated for royal pretensions of one kind or another. The recollection of royalty is used to chasten presidents, to remind them that where kings have fallen, presidents should walk carefully. Perhaps it also marks an unseemly kinship between kingship and executive power.

There are, however, moments, when a President approaches not only the memory, but the crime of kingship. In the late days of Watergate, Paul Conrad drew Richard Nixon as Richard II http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/tag/paul-conrad-richard-nixon/⁷ Nixon, Michael Rogin argued, recognized his kinship to earlier Presidents who had set the law aside. Rogin quoted Paine, “In America the law is king,” observing that “America celebrated its bicentennial by overthrowing a president who, promising a “second American revolution,” cast himself as king. ‘When the President does it, Richard Nixon explained, ‘that means that it is not illegal.”⁸ He identified his own actions as a war President with those of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had “personally and without congressional authorization conscripted an army; suppressed opposition newspapers; suspended...