Comparisons between Trump and Mad King George are unfair — to King George: historian
Are there legitimate comparisons between President Donald Trump and King George III?
March 24, 2025
George III, king of Great Britain and its colonies at the time of the American Revolution, has been maligned unfairly.
During both the first and now the second term of President Donald Trump, commentators in the U.S. have invoked the king’s misdeeds to criticize Trump. When the president bypassed Congress to create a new government agency, appointed its head and stopped payment of millions of dollars of allocated federal funds, his critics noted that he assumed the role of Congress, a power grab that supposedly made him similar to George III. According to this criticism, the president engaged in tyranny, just as the founders accused George of doing.
As a scholar of early America, I believe, however, that George III has gotten a bad rap. He was not the all-powerful monarch that Trump allegedly aspires to be.
In the 1770s, the power of the British king was limited by the authority of Parliament. In that system, which Americans and others praised at the time as balanced, the king and the legislature each had specific duties and powers so that neither could control the government alone.
George III was not an absolutist monarch, to use the language of the day for a power-hungry ruler. The English had struggled in the previous century over the extent of the king’s power. After fighting two civil wars, executing one king, and, eventually, forcing the monarch to agree to rule with Parliament rather than on his own, they believed their liberties were safeguarded.
This system, known as limited monarchy, was the pride of Great Britain. It was also admired by the American founders. As late as 1774, in his Summary View of the Rights of British America, Thomas Jefferson praised the “free and ancient principles” of the British constitution in which “kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.”
Trump has been compared with King George III by many writers and commentators; the White House on Feb. 19, 2024, issued the fake magazine cover of Trump crowned like a king. Various
No kingly tyranny
Britons, whether in Great Britain or the colonies, did fear a tyrant, a controlling and abusive leader.
Some fears came from their study of political theory, which taught that government worked best when composed of various branches that represented the concerns of the different political classes.
As this theory went, an unbalanced government would descend into tyranny with a too-powerful monarch; oligarchy under a dominant aristocratic class; or anarchy with the people out of control. They believed these perils could be avoided only by maintaining balance.
Even though the British did not fear imbalance or a tyrant king in their own case, they could see the danger threatening elsewhere in Europe.
France represented a worst-case scenario. Its absolutist kings had ruled without France’s legislature – the Estates General – for more than a century and a half at the time of the American Revolution. British poet Robert Wolseley’s often reprinted poem declared: “Let France grow proud beneath the tyrant’s lust, While the rackt people crawl and lick the dust. The mighty Genius of this isle disdains Ambitious slavery and golden chains.”
Within a few years, Anglo-American criticism of kingly tyranny in France would be validated: That country descended into a violent revolution that resulted in decades of warfare and political violence, including the execution of the entire royal family.
This experience confirmed for the British and Americans that a balanced system was best and that they should count their blessings.
Why revolt?
A list of grievances held by the American Colonies against King George III, set down in Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the American Declaration of Independence, which ultimately included 27 grievances against the king.
MPI/Getty Images
If the American revolutionaries admired the British system and sought to copy it in the United States, why did they reject the link to Britain and revolt in the first place?
Americans did not revolt against the nature of British government. Rather they objected to their changing place within the British Empire. The revolutionary crisis had a number of roots, but most of them arose out of changes in the management of the relationship between the American Colonies and the imperial center.
From the 1760s, the British government took a more activist role in its American Colonies, limiting their geographical expansion and imposing taxes directly on the population. In the past, Colonists had been free to move west, challenged only by the indigenous residents who fought to defend their lands.
Now the British government, aiming to put an end to these wars, blocked expansion. At the same time, to pay down the debt accrued in recent war with France – and fought in part in North America – the government levied taxes not via the Colonial legislatures, as it had before, but directly on residents. This change sparked revolt and, eventually, revolution
Turning on the king
American Colonists pull down a statue of King George III in New York City during the American Revolution.Corbis via Getty Images
Before 1776, the Colonists believed that George III would come to their rescue and halt these changes imposed by Parliament. They thought initially that he did not realize how the new policies affected them.
Only in 1776 did they accept that George III supported the policy changes and would not defend their rights. It was in that context that they turned on him and declared him tyrannical, blaming him for the new policies and calling for a break with Britain. As the Declaration of Independence said: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
Although they complained about the tyranny of George III, their true objection was that their subordinate position within the empire gave them little leverage when opposing policies that king and Parliament agreed to impose on them.
Once independent, the founders created a system that imitated the British model of mixed governance and created barriers – the powers of Congress and the oversight of the Supreme Court – that they hoped would safeguard their liberties against the threat of renewed tyranny.
Carla Gardina Pestana, Professor and Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World, University of California, Los Angeles
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
