Obviously, Guyatt said, President Donald Trump does manifest king-like behavior, such as his affection for “gold fittings and furnishings.” What’s more important, though, is how Trump is approaching his authority.
“I think arbitrary power and executive power is a much closer point of contact between that moment and this one,” Guyatt said. “If you think for a moment about those two things really being laid out in this agenda by Trump of, in a sense, governing the entire nation by executive order, there is a very close correlation in my mind between that practice of government and — not necessarily what King George III himself was doing, but what patriots said he was doing in this period from the summer of 1775, certainly through until the Declaration of Independence.”
Our romanticized version of the Lexington story tends to overlook everything that led to that moment. The colonists didn’t spontaneously take up arms; they were organized to be prepared to do so. And they weren’t taking a stand because of vague complaints about British rule; there was a robust and successful effort to present British rule through the lens of an overbearing, aloof king.
“Americans, through their long tradition of representative government in the colonial system, are very familiar with the idea that power shouldn’t be arbitrary,” Guyatt said of the colonists. “They’re very familiar with the idea that executive power should be balanced and checked by some form of legislative or assembly power. They know all of that, which means there is a big reservoir of potential resentment which the patriots can tap into in trying to persuade other colonists to join the cause in ’75 and in ’76.”
“The secret sauce of the revolution,” he continued, “is the ability of these committees of correspondence — the Sons of Liberty, these various patriot groups — to channel these facts toward an argument about Britain as impervious to compromise and Britain being fanatic and tyrannical. And then to lead that toward the notion that you can only fight your way out of this corner.”
What unfolded at Lexington and in the months that followed — months that led up to the Declaration of Independence — was, as Guyatt put it, a “crystallization” of the idea that what had been presented as a unified British nation was, in reality, two nations divided by the Atlantic Ocean.
“The big difference between then and now,” he said, “is that it was very clear to a whole number of different people what the route out of this would be back in 1775” — namely, American independence. “The solution back then doesn’t seem to me to be of that much use to us now in thinking about possible responses to what Trump’s up to.”