When the White House’s official Twitter account posted an image of President Donald Trump donning a crown with the caption, “Long live the king,” many Americans were understandably upset. Anyone who knows basic history remembers that the United States was created — in fact, famously DECLARED INDEPENDENCE — in response to the tyranny of one of the world’s most powerful empires, Great Britain, and its hereditary sovereign King George III.
In his first video for Zeteo, Frank Cappello humorously questions why, after almost two and a half centuries of democracy, Donald Trump and his Republican party would want the US to return to being under the yoke of an all-powerful king. Donning an 18th century wig, Frank asks: Could it be the ‘Unitary Executive Theory’, which has been bolstered by conservative think tanks for the past several decades? Or could it be the anti-democratic ‘Dark Enlightenment’ movement and its sycophants like Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance who have now found themselves in positions of power?
America’s Founding Fathers wrote extensively about their distaste, disgust, and detestment of absolute monarchs as they sought to create an independent republic organized around representative democracy — not the whims of some random royal who hit the genetic lottery. To quote Thomas Jefferson: “There is scarcely an evil known in [European] countries which may not be traced to their king as its source.”
What an irony that it would be the ‘Republican’ party that appears to be ditching the republic in favor of a monarchy!
Frank Cappello is the senior producer of Zeteo’s flagship podcast ‘We’re Not Kidding’. He is also a comedian and comedy writer.
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