Our 250th anniversary requires pro-Trump redcoats as well as pro-democracy bluecoats to re-enact our anti-monarchial founding.
by Harold Meyerson November 24, 2025 (Prospect.org)
Last February 6th—17 days after Donald Trump had begun his second term—the Prospect posted a piece I’d written noting that the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord would soon be upon us, and suggesting that the anti-Trump protests that were sure to come should rightly be presented as a tribute to our anti-monarchial patriotic forebears and a continuation and renewal of the ideals they fought for. This was one of several articles that helped hone the No Kings focus of the anti-Trump demonstrations. Of course, it was Trump’s conduct in office—his embrace of the l’état c’est moi ethos of Louis XIV that was antithetical to any democratic system of government, his indifference to the Constitution’s limits on presidential powers, his open displays of greed and racism, his conversion of the executive branch into a personal court, a gilded Versailles knockoff; this list could go on and on—that really prompted the No Kings thematics of the protests.
But popular awareness of the anniversary of Lexington and Concord pales alongside that of our national founding via our Declaration of Independence, when there will likely be tens of thousands of celebrations, and perhaps a kindred number of No Kings protests. Indeed, for those with even the slimmest knowledge of American history, it will be all but impossible to disaggregate the two. After all, the Declaration is nothing if not a chronicle of monarchial violations of civilized norms. It held King George III responsible for “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” It said the king “has refused his Assent to Laws” (that is, refused to recognize the laws passed by colonial legislatures). He was responsible, it continued, “For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.” These abrupt and unanswerable transfers of power from legally established colonial legislatures to the Crown were at the center of the Founders’ case for revolution.
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In 1776’s bill of particulars, we can recognize Trump’s own violations, which are if anything much worse. He not only has refused to recognize laws passed by the states; he has ordered the government to withhold funds and the Justice Department to sue those states that have passed laws regulating AI, even as the vast majority of the public and the Congress are on record supporting states’ regulatory rights. His impoundment of congressionally appropriated funds—withholding FEMA funds from disaster-stricken blue states, for instance, while deploying them in red states—certainly alters the forms of government that Article I of our Constitution mandates. His brutal deportation policies and deployment of troops to our cities runs afoul of our Posse Comitatus restrictions, and his shaking down media institutions until they report news in a way that doesn’t upset him makes a mockery of the First Amendment.
Moreover, the accusations that Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and their Declaration co-authors leveled against King George were that he was in violation of Britain’s unwritten Constitution. Trump’s violations, by contrast, run afoul of our written Constitution: The articles and amendments he has trashed can be specified, chapter and verse.
Which means that any celebration of our Declaration of Independence can condemn Trump by both the letter of textual originalism and the spirit of “unalienable” human rights laid out in the Declaration.
Come July 4th, the opportunity to both celebrate our foundational values and condemn Donald Trump requires us to go beyond the No Kings demonstrations we’ve held up to now. Doubtless, some celebrations will feature mini-parades of patriots dressed as bluecoats, as colonial soldiers. My suggestion is that we also dramatize just what our patriot founders were up against. An appropriate combination of a celebratory July 4th commemoration and a No Kings demonstration should also include demonstrators dressed as British redcoats flying banners featuring pictures of Trump (or Trump and King George) that hail monarchy and subservience to tyrants and condemn the rule of the people and the institution of law that rulers must obey. Mini-dramas pitting (verbally only) these redcoat defenders of monarchs and Trump against bluecoat defenders of democracy and the rule of law, with the latter brandishing American flags, should be the order of the day.
As Lincoln said of Gettysburg and the Civil War generally, Trump has required us to test “whether that nation [ours] or any nation so conceived [in liberty] and dedicated [to the proposition that all men are created equal] can long endure.” That is what Trump has brought us to, and we should take the occasion of July 4th, 2026, to make unmistakably clear which side honors, perpetuates, and renews the “Spirit of ’76” and which side trashes it in the name of a tin-pot despot.
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Mitchell Grummon
Publisher
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Harold Meyerson
Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect. His email is hmeyerson@prospect.org. Follow @HaroldMeyerson More by Harold Meyerson
