The American Revolution did something no modern nation had ever done before. It rejected the divine right of kings—the ancient belief that authority was bestowed by God and inherited by blood—and replaced it with a radical and fragile proposition: that power belongs to the people and is only lent to those who govern. That single break from history reordered the political world. It transformed subjects into citizens, obedience into consent, and rulers into temporary stewards bound by law. The Constitution was written to preserve that arrangement, to restrain ambition and to make the abuse of power difficult by design.
Two centuries later, the architecture remains, but the understanding that once sustained it is eroding at a pace that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago.
The founders feared the concentration of power above all else. They debated monarchy, briefly entertained versions of it, and rejected it outright. What they created instead was a president deliberately constrained, balanced by a Congress they expected to dominate national life. The judiciary, in turn, was meant to serve as a check on both political branches, not as a governing force of its own. The presidency, by design, was the most constrained of the three.
That did not last.
With each succeeding administration, executive authority expanded. Emergency became precedent. Precedent hardened into expectation.
No one understood the danger of that better than George Washington.
He could have been king. The army would have followed him. The public would have accepted it. Even some of his officers urged him to take the crown. Instead, he refused—twice. First when he surrendered his military command to Congress, and again when he stepped away from the presidency after two terms, establishing by example what the Constitution had not yet required: that the office belonged to the republic, not the man.
In his Farewell Address, Washington warned that the nation would not be undone by foreign armies, but by domestic ambition. Political factions, he cautioned, would “kindle the animosity of one part against another,” opening the door for “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” to subvert the will of the people. Loyalty to individuals would one day compete with loyalty to the Constitution. Party would become shelter for power. The machinery of government would be turned inward to serve a single will.
That, he believed, was the true path back to monarchy—not through crowns or titles, but through habit. Through gradual accommodation. Through a people slowly persuaded that the concentration of power is safer than its division.
That understanding is now fading.
In Trump’s second term, the presidency is increasingly treated not as an office temporarily entrusted with authority, but as a personal instrument of rule. Congress, constitutionally charged with jealously guarding its own power, has grown hesitant, conditional, transactional. Oversight is negotiated. Subpoenas are softened. Budgetary authority is deferred. Constitutional confrontation is avoided in favor of partisan alignment.
The courts, meanwhile, have supplied legal vocabulary for what amounts to a structural transformation. In Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court announced that a president enjoys absolute immunity for “core constitutional acts” and presumptive immunity for all other official conduct—language that quietly relocates the presidency from within the legal system to a position partially above it. The decision does not merely protect a former president from prosecution. It alters the relationship between law and executive power itself.
The founders anticipated no such immunity. Hamilton argued explicitly that a president, once out of office, would stand “liable to prosecution in the ordinary course of law.” The Court has now written that assumption out of practical existence.
The consequences are no longer theoretical. Executive orders substitute for legislation. Agencies are directed where statutes hesitate. Accountability is postponed through procedure, uncertainty and delay.
When a president can declare entire categories of conduct “official,” deploy federal agents into American cities over the objections of local officials, and rely on courts to delay or foreclose accountability altogether, the distinction between constitutional authority and personal rule begins to blur.
The founders did not speak about tyranny in the abstract. They itemized it.
The Declaration of Independence does not merely announce separation from the Crown; it catalogs the mechanics of power sliding into personal rule, showing how lawful authority decays not all at once, but through repetition, obstruction and contempt for restraint.
George III, they wrote, had “refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” He had “dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.” He had “obstructed the Administration of Justice,” and made judges “dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices.” He had “kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies, without the Consent of our legislatures,” and had “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.”
Taken together, these were not isolated abuses. They were a pattern: a legislature punished for resistance, courts bent toward loyalty, law obstructed when inconvenient, legal authority displaced by executive preference, and force normalized as governance.
The Declaration’s conclusion was blunt: “A history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
The founders were not describing a bad king.
They were describing the process by which kings are made.
They understood that monarchy is not defined by a crown. It is defined by behavior: when law becomes conditional, when institutions exist but no longer restrain, when opposition is treated as disloyalty, and when the state reorganizes itself around one will.
Read that list today and the resemblance is no longer academic. Legislation bypassed by executive order. Courts redefined as obstacles or instruments. Agencies redirected. Legal accountability delayed or declared unconstitutional.
The vocabulary has changed. The structure has not.
The Declaration was meant to be a warning as much as a justification, a record of how free people become subjects while still calling themselves citizens.
The American Revolution was not merely a rejection of one king. It was a rejection of kingship itself.
It denied the idea that authority could reside permanently in a person rather than temporarily in an office. It denied that law could bend to will. It denied that armed force could be the private instrument of a single executive. It denied that loyalty could replace consent, or that power could excuse itself.
George Washington understood this. That is why he refused a crown. Why he surrendered his command. Why he walked away from the presidency.
The Constitution was written to make that temptation difficult: separation of powers, legislative supremacy, civilian control, accountability after office, a presidency energetic but fenced in by law.
The Roberts Court has chosen to dismantle those fences. Executive immunity has moved the president closer to the legal position of a sovereign—protected not by divine right, but by judicial doctrine. Congress, designed to resist, hesitates. Courts redefine restraint as deference. Armed force is normalized as administration.
None of this arrives with a coronation.
It arrives with opinions, with procedures, with carefully written exceptions, with language that sounds technical and reasonable, with citizens told not to worry.
That is how monarchy returns to a nation that swore it off.
Not with a crown.
But with a theory of power that no longer remembers why kings were dangerous in the first place.
