My wife and I are enjoying the Ken Burns documentary on PBS, “The American Revolution.” Like the British King, Trump has imposed unpopular taxes and laws, dissolved government agencies, and used force against Americans. The similarities between Trump and British King George are striking.
► British General Howe invaded American cities with troops from 1775 to 1778, just like Commander At Large Gregory Bovino, the villain of ICE Deportations. General Howe brought the despised redcoats to New York, Philadelphia and New Jersey. MAGA enforcer Bovino brought the despised, armed ICE agents in black masks to Los Angeles, Chicago, and Charlotte.
► The British King imposed widely-hated taxes like the Sugar Act (1764), the Stamp Act (1765) and the Townshend Acts (1767). Trump has taxed Americans in 2025 with tariffs on goods from 100 countries, raising the prices of groceries, shoes, clothing, aluminum foil, furniture, electronics and household textiles.
► The British dissolved colonist governments, like the New York Assembly, the Virginia House of Burgesses, assemblies in North Carolina and South Carolina and all of Massachusetts’ government bodies. Trump has dismantled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Department of Education, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.
Personal power
Both Donald Trump and King George III were leaders who personalized power, resisted constraints, and framed political conflict as a test of loyalty to themselves. George III imposed coercive measures and prolonged the Revolutionary War because he saw backing down as a personal defeat and a threat to imperial authority.
Trump has taken authoritarian and autocratic actions, attacking courts, the press, threatening political opponents with death, and seeking to centralize decision-making around his own will.
America, then and now, was deeply divided, as British Tories opposed independence, swore loyalty to the crown and ultimately fled the colonies on boats.
Of course, in 1776, just about every colonist had a musket or long rifle. Today, the American population is 342 million, and Americans have more guns than people.
Jefferson could be referring to 2025 when he wrote, “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”
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We’re enjoying it too. It also has a sobering amount of nuance – the revolutionaries were not just heroes – they were very focused on taking land away from native populations and keeping millions enslaved, and as an expedient, the British took comparatively positive positions on both points. The British generals offered freedom to enslaved people and assurances of sovereignty to native people. All of that being said, the notions of liberty and equality set a direction that took many years to lead to even the level we have now. Burns clearly describes all of this.
When will today’s Americans reach their Lexington and Concord moments or will they just sleepwalk their way into Manzanar or Tule Lake or Gila River concentration camps with eyeballs glued to cellphone screens?
Thanks for mentioning Gila River internment camp up north near Phoenix. I met three families who had been interned there and they told me about the miserable living conditions, with no AC. They had to build their own swamp coolers if they could. One descendant told me that his imprisoned grandfather was a ‘broken man’ after that Gila River camp experience. And Tule Lake in California was a worse camp, where the more troublesome people were sent, the “no-no” individuals, who refused to sign those loyalty oaths.