February 19, 2025

Just Remember You Belong To Me

I know this is hardly the most important thing right now but as someone with a lot of European history under his belt...

I take issue with people comparing Trump to “A King” or saying he’s acting like one or wants to be one by seizing “absolute power” and behaving recklessly with our country (aka, like “A King”). And I take even bigger issue with him referring to himself as one.

Most historical Kings (and Queens) did not have "absolute power". For one thing, within their own realms and courts were people of varying degrees of influence and affluence whose access to and control of natural, social, or capital resources both local or within adjacent power structures meant that they had to be at least nominally respected and often collaborated with, placated, neutralized, or allied with if any kind of large scale policy changes were to be made- making swift, unchecked change actually rather rare in the middle ages. Additionally, if the King or Queen were Christian (and most of the ones you can name were) than they were still answerable to the Church locally, the Pope globally, God, spiritually. Sure, some of them didn't take that very seriously (and some took it too seriously) but the point is, they had morals and ethics they were supposed to adhere to like anyone else under God (or anyone elected instead of born to their positions, for that matter), and they didn't determine those morals and ethics themselves, they were still expected to participate in the social contract that pre-existed their individual birth, and when they compromised their role they could be held to task and frequently were: history is full of all shades of punished, contrite, and reformed royalty. And dead royalty. Very few of them, from what we know, thought themselves above repercussion, and the ones who did usually ended up dead- faster, younger, and messier.

And that's because, additionally, and arguably more importantly, while feudalism and estate based society was hardly perfect (and I’m not suggesting a return here), it was still quite functional because it was intrinsically INTERDEPENDENT. Top and bottom of the pyramid relied on one another to uphold, more or less, the order of things, and in MOST nations post collapse of Western Rome, the distance both socially and economically between a King and even his poorest subject was actually relatively small, especially when compared today with the distance between a CEO and a service worker. Society was more or less divided into three buckets (Royalty, Commoners, Clergy), each of which had very spelled out expectations of themselves and the others, and none of which were "Fuck around and have fun doing whatever you want all day!" All three sectors worked, all three sectors owed allegiance to one another. The rampant materialism the we associate with the wealthy of today wasn’t really a thing: everyone had the same stuff, royalty just had more or it, though most of it was functional and utilitarian, even if it was aesthetically beautiful or exceptionally well made, because most of what humans owned pre-Industrial Revolution, had to be functional first. Everyone was also reliant on the same resources, the same sources and supply lines of those resources, and dealt with the same challenges of environment, invasion, and disease, as well as the same reprieves. The Three Estates didn't allow for much social mobility, to be sure, but it also didn't allow for much ball dropping either and generally speaking the three Estates not only co-existed, but struggled- and celebrated- together. Peasants, after all, had all the same holidays as Kings. The First Estate ensured everyone had a day of rest, long before capitalism was essentially forced to.

It helps that until the mid 17th century, most government was extremely local (as in, there was a VIP about every 100 square miles, often less) and even when there was a centralized King, because the success or failure of a kingdom relied on its many small parts holding up their end of the feudal system (and were literally prevented by law from attempting to become self-sufficient), the objective of most kings was to keep the peace, not oppress the dickens out of the people, because there was no real reward for it. If you wanted money, you were better off getting it from war or inter-realm trade then your own people because starving peasants don’t farm so hot. Most kings for most of the middle ages were far too busy dealing with their various local lords to be too much worried about the general populace and when the general populace was unhappy it was usually the local government that came under fire- from both directions.

Louis XIV, the so-called "Sun King", got that title because he so drastically shifted the model by not just centralizing his power, but literally making him self the center of the French Second Estate (and arguably The First, though it had already been eroding thanks to the Reformation) by REQUIRING that all the people in subordinate levels of government (which was everyone, including his own family) be housed in what was pretty much a luxury prison, so they couldn't do anything- good, bad, or otherwise- without him knowing. One incredibly bad result of this (and there were many) is that it separated (both geographically and socially) the ruling class from the people they were ruling so substantially that, no surpise, by the time of the French Revolution a hundred years later, they really had nothing in common with one another anymore. The irony of the Sun King, is that in his effort to have absolute power, he made the role of monarchy entirely pointless, The Second Estate useless, and the First Estate powerless. Contrary to popular readings of the French Revolution, the majority of aristocrats executed weren't even oppressors and schemers but bureaucrats, high level servants, and royal hostages (as in low-ranking royals held as collateral so their parents or children did as they were told) with far less personal freedom than most citizens, just better clothes. Many of the people arrested at Versailles had been so cloistered there they not only couldn’t have been responsible for the state of France, they probably hadn’t ever even seen it or been given the option to do something about it. The atrocities of the royal family were almost entirely fabricated, and suspiciously sound like things MAGA says about Democrats, but people convinced themselves and each other what they wanted to hear to propel the change they wanted to see made- and needed to be made, as the Sun King's brand of monarchy was neither sustainable nor relevant. And the thing about Divine Right, is that it also comes with Divine Responsibility, and just as a captain goes down with the ship, it has been generally understood since Cleopatra and the asp that if your kingdom fell, you did too. For most royalty, through most of history, it actually hasn’t been good to be the king. Just better dressed.

All of which is to say, Trump isn't a King in any real sense of the word. He displays no accountability to anyone, has no spiritual value system, no sense of how his role functions in a bigger picture. He has no sense of noblesse oblige let alone actual responsibility towards the people or the nation he is supposed to be leading, the constitution doesn’t matter to him any more than scripture or legacy or even just the dignity of the office (all motivations behind the more successful monarchs of the past- and present) to which he has been elected. Twice. He doesn’t see any connection between himself and the rest of us; HE IS NOT A KING BECAUSE WE ARE NOT EVEN SUBJECTS. We do not register in the slightest, as chess pieces or assets or even enemies with shovels and torches. He doesn’t want to be King any more than he wants to be a husband or a business man or any of the other roles he adopts but always for the same reason: so he can do whatever he wants.

Trump’s just a flat-out psychopath either too stupid to realize he’s going to be ruling a wasteland or too solipsistic to care; real kings usually want to be the king of something, and they want other people around to enjoy it with. His actions aren’t on parr with anything the Old Regime would have approved of and I think even Napoleon would have considered his unapologetic hatred for his own people galling as for all Bonaparte’s nasty defects, a lack of patriotism and allegiance to the French wasn't one of them. Trump's historical equivalents aren’t tragic figures like Louis XVI, or rightfully maligned ones like Nicholas II or Henry VIII, or wildly inadequate ones like King John, or even retrospectively morally ambiguous but also reasonably competent ones, like George III. Whatever their crimes, all of those people were trying to fulfill a role they didn’t choose and nobody can truly fill. They were all trying to be The King, something they saw as a duty obligated by God, an honor but one with only one way out. That some of them would go about being King in terrible ways was a given, as it is with any number of humans in any number or roles over time, but it is unlikely any of them aspired to be diabolical so much as became corrupted by a role ill-suited but inescapable.

Trump chose his role and he choses to do this with it. And he thinks he's not only gonna get away with it, but that he'll retire like the rest of us, the day he no longer feels like being the bane of human progress. That’s not a King. That's not even a Tyrant.

That's just a straight up criminal

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Thank you for reading!

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