Mother Jones illustration; Getty; Sir William Beechey/Royal Collection/Wikipedia
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
Back in September, House Speaker Mike Johnson offered a directive to big-city mayors opposing military occupations of their communities. “Yield, man,” Johnson said. “Let the troops come into your cities.”
A little more than 250 years earlier, King George III of Great Britain gave his American subjects similar orders. His effort started badly. The redcoats’ occupation of colonial cities was one of the “injuries and usurpations” that our country’s founders, in the Declaration of Independence, listed as reasons for the Revolutionary War. “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures,” Thomas Jefferson and his compatriots complained.
The US Constitution and the resulting federal republic were intended to avoid the abuses of an unchecked monarch. But Johnson seeming to channel the British king was not some isolated faux pas. Even as the United States prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of independence from George’s rule, his views are enjoying a resurgence.
President Donald Trump, for example, posted an AI-generated video of himself dumping shit on “No Kings” demonstrators. In the clip, the president flies a jet labeled “King Trump.” That was part of a full-throated denunciation by Trump and his allies of protesters armed only with homemade anti-monarchy signs and American flags. MAGA politicians tried to link hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to antifa, George Soros, and Hamas. But working that hard to smear opponents of runaway executive power sort of speaks for itself. If you’re that against “No Kings,” you’re probably pro-king. That’s just math.
The villain of the American Revolution has, it turns out, become a hero of Trump’s second administration. The spirit of the late ruler rises as the administration and its allies work to seize power and attack civil liberties, and as they refer to the president, in their trolling-but-not-really-joking way, as “King.”
Republicans running Congress have surrendered powers the Constitution gives them, allowing Trump to wield increasingly monarchical authority. Congress has declined to enforce its exclusive power over federal spending, allowing the executive branch to refuse to spend money as previously passed laws direct. Lawmakers have also punted on exercising their power to declare war, leaving Trump to assert that a state of war with drug cartels permits the extrajudicial execution of people suspected of transporting cocaine in the Caribbean.
“The president is now a king above the law,” Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in 2024 after her colleagues concocted a doctrine granting presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions related to their official duties. The high court has since supported Sotomayor’s reading, relying on its so-called shadow docket to allow Trump to enact an agenda that lower courts had ruled illegal and unconstitutional.
Then there is taxation without representation. Trump and congressional Republicans not only occupied the District of Columbia with National Guard troops and various federal agents, but they also enacted a budget that barred Washington, which lacks voting representation in Congress, from spending $1.1 billion of its own money.
Even colonialism is back. George embodied it. The founders fought it. And, at least in the past century, the United States mostly has avoided overtly colonizing territory. But Trump’s attempts to bully Greenland and Panama into ceding sovereignty to the US summons the colonizing spirit that the Revolution rejected. More broadly, Trump’s interest in using US power to extract wealth from smaller states, recently expressed in a national security strategy and a peace plan for Ukraine, revive the mercantilist policies of the old British Empire.
Take tariffs. The Declaration of Independence, in successive sentences, faults George’s government for “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world” and “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.” Trump’s tariffs—taxes and trade restrictions that were not voted on by Congress—honor King George more than John Hancock.
In White House meetings, Cabinet secretaries engage in ritualized sycophancy that would have made King Louis XIV of France blush. Trump has covered the Oval Office in gold, hatched plans to put his profile on both sides of a $1 coin, and named the US Institute of Peace after himself. And in occupied Washington, in supposed celebration of a war to cast off monarchy, federal agencies are festooned with massive banners featuring the big man’s face.
Defeated in the Revolution, George is mounting a comeback. 2025, a bad year for American democracy, was a good one for its first enemy. The king is dead. Long live the king.
