The 250th anniversary of America’s liberation from a king kicked off with a campaign-style rally on the National Mall by President Donald Trump, whose face already stares down from banners fluttering from federal buildings across the nation’s capital.
The images illustrate how the Republican president has dominated daily life since returning to power and, to some, evoke more the style of a monarch than the leader of the world’s oldest democracy. But it’s also how he has wielded that power that has led to comparisons of an imperial reign.
Since returning to office in January 2025, Trump has nominated one of his personal lawyers to serve as attorney general, ordered the Department of Justice to pursue his political enemies, deployed the U.S. Marines to the nation’s second largest city and leveraged the presidency to enrich himself and his family.
He has demanded that comedians who mock him be fired, has slapped his name on the Kennedy Center, has pushed to seize control of elections, has filed lawsuits against news organizations whose coverage he disliked and has sued his own government seeking $10 billion in taxpayer money.
With the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding fast approaching, Trump’s own celebrations have overshadowed the bipartisan, congressionally authorized commission that was supposed to coordinate events commemorating the moment. He plans to return to the National Mall on July Fourth for what he calls a “Trump rally.”
The president’s actions have led to comparisons with King George III, the British monarch whose rule inspired the American Revolution. It is a parallel Trump himself rejects.
“I’m not a king,” he told CBS’ “60 Minutes” earlier this year. “If I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.”
There is a long American political traditional of opponents reviling presidents as kings. But Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University historian, said the label fits differently on Trump.
“It’s more about how he imagines who is he and what the presidency is,” Zelizer said. “We’re celebrating founding principles, and that was a driving issue — fears of how a centralized power can be corrupted. And here we are again.”
When King Charles III visited Trump this year, the official White House X account posted an image of the two men with the caption “TWO KINGS.” At the start of his second term, Trump declared he had ended a New York City transportation program and posted: “LONG LIVE THE KING.” The posts also seemed to indicate a willingness to leverage the label and the reaction it provokes in his critics.
It is no coincidence that the main resistance movement in Trump’s second term adopted the slogan “No Kings.” Ezra Levin of Indivisible said activists were thinking ahead to 2026 and the America 250 celebration when they chose the label.
“It looks like the same kind of tyranny we were rebelling against 250 years ago, the type of domination of Americans by a secret police force that’s murdering people in the streets like in Minneapolis this year and in Boston in 1770,” Levin said, referring to demonstrations against the administration’s immigration crackdown that led to the fatal shootings of two protesters this year by federal officers.
When asked for comment, the White House referred to Trump’s own statements about his use of executive power. The president has weighed in multiple times about his maximalist approach.
During his first term, he referred to Article II of the Constitution when he told participants in a youth summit, “I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” while declaring that it “gives me all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before.” He told The New York Times in an interview this year that the only check on his global power was “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Yet he also has said that portrayals of his approach as authoritarian were wrong: “I’m not a dictator,” he told reporters last year. In response to a question about whether he was concentrating power in the presidency, Trump told Time in an interview last year, “I don’t think so. I think I’m using it properly, and I’m also using it as per my election.”
With a deferential Republican-controlled Congress, courts have become the last check on Trump. The president has harshly criticized judges who have ruled against him, and his administration has sometimes defied their orders.
Yet his quest to expand presidential power has been aided by the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, which has sided with Trump numerous times after lower court rulings hampered him.
In the middle of his 2024 campaign, the high court ruled that presidents have broad immunity from prosecution. The decision derailed multiple investigations stemming from Trump’s first term, including one focused on his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Trump has argued the courts cannot constrain the president on key issues, including his claims that he has the ability to fire members of independent agencies. The most notorious example was in 2024, when a judge asked during the immunity case whether a president could be prosecuted for ordering the assassination of a political rival. Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, answered with a “qualified yes.”
Sauer is now solicitor general, the administration official who oversees arguments before the high court. He has continued to insist that courts cannot review presidential acts.
“Once the President has made a determination … at that point, there’s no work for the reviewing court to do,” Sauer said during Supreme Court arguments in a case over whether Trump could fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor.
But the Supreme Court has allowed Cook to remain on the board while it considers the case. The majority also slapped down his global tariffs, finding that only Congress had that authority.
Such rulings demonstrate that presidential power does have its limits, said John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
“The presidency today, even when colored by President Trump’s worst excesses, is not a monarchy,” he said.
