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November 23, 2022

The “Great MAGA King” — that’s what Joe Biden and others have called Donald Trump, and it’s hard not to embrace the frivolity of the moniker, even though that is not what Dementia Joe’s handlers had in mind.

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I’ve never been one for kings.  I enjoy reading about them, as I enjoy reading the history of nation-states around the world.  But I am an American, and as any of my God-fearing, red-blooded countrymen can attest, what runs through our veins includes a natural predisposition toward overthrowing the privileges of monarchy.

It has been said since his time that had President George Washington so desired, he could have established an American monarchy and become king.  Instead, he self-consciously chose to follow in the footsteps of Cincinnatus, who took complete control over the Roman Republic during a time of invasion two and a quarter millennia earlier, only to relinquish his tremendous powers upon victory and return to his humble farm.  So, too, did Washington return to his Mount Vernon after only two terms in office, and the precedent he set for his successors restrained their tenures as well, until FDR’s four consecutive presidential victories prompted passage of the 22nd Amendment’s constitutional enforcement of Washington’s republican virtue.  Our first president’s uncanny wisdom helped build an American nation dedicated to principles that exist beyond dutiful loyalty to any one man.

When I enthusiastically endorse Decrepit Joe’s title for Donald Trump, I do so not in any misguided belief that only Donald Trump can or should hold the Office of the Presidency.  I do not believe that America should be a country for rulers, subjects, or reigns. 

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For decades now, tremendous economic and political power has accumulated into the hands of a small few in D.C., and American leaders have proven that they have neither the fortitude nor the inclination to rectify this calamity.  National politicians may pretend they stand for Washington’s republican virtues, but when they preside over a national security surveillance State that embraces censorship, unilateral rule-making, and political persecution, they are tyrants disguising their authoritarianism as “democratic.”  

Only Donald Trump has so far dared to put his personal security and freedom on the line to denounce what D.C. has become, and only Trump has risked impeachment, indictment, and incarceration for fearlessly speaking the truth.  In my mind, that kind of personal sacrifice cannot be easily dismissed.  Just as Cincinnatus left his farm and Washington left Mount Vernon for causes greater than their own comforts, President Trump is willing to leave Mar-a-Lago and risk all again, and I am thankful for it.

I believe that America should be a country whose government’s legitimacy resides in the consent of the people and whose federalist structure and republican separation of powers divide authority among those holding offices into as small and competing parts as possible.  I am against too much power accumulating in any place at the expense of others — whether that excess takes the form of a centralized, national government strangling state sovereignty, the administrative bureaucracy acting unilaterally as if congressional and executive authorities are no longer distinct, or the federal government’s slow usurpation of liberties belonging solely to individual citizens as natural rights.

Whenever any government exerts jurisdiction over human beings, the exact form of government takes secondary precedence to the importance of individual liberty.  Where personal freedom is protected and allowed to flourish, society prospers, and humanity advances.  Where human liberty is neither respected nor sought, only enslavement, misery, and destitution progress.  

The Founding Fathers in America, aware that human history is a recurring story of liberty lost and won, emancipation and defeat, consciously built an adversarial government designed to pit personal ambitions against each other, while preventing the aggregation of power in any one man.  By creating a constitutional structure that encourages power struggles between individuals and their government, between the state governments and the federal government, and among the branches of the federal government itself, James Madison’s and his colleagues’ intent was to maximize human liberty and minimize State control.

This singular recognition that the protection of personal freedom is government’s principal purpose and that all legitimate forms of government therefore rest on the continued consent of the people was — and remains — revolutionary.  No longer was political authority at the top of an aristocratic hierarchy justified simply because those with raw power willed it to be so, but rather power was recognized as residing first among the people, who then vested political offices with temporary authority.  Seen together, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution effectively turned the historical rationalization for government power on its head.  And it is safe to say that the world’s traditional ruling nobility — those we might call the “elites” today — have been trying to put this American genie back in its bottle ever since!