To commit lèse-majesté was, and in some places still is, to commit an offense against the dignity of the crown. The basic idea was that under a monarch, the integrity of the state rested on the stature of the king. To insult or question the monarch was to undermine the state itself. In the absolutist states of medieval and early modern Europe, lèse-majesté was a high crime, punishable by death. It matters too, on that point, that even the highest officials in our government owe their power to the people and not the heritage of blood or divine right. How fitting then that under Donald Trump, a president with monarchical pretensions, the United States is getting a sharp taste of what it is like when the ruler’s name is inviolate.

It is practically cliché to observe that President Trump is jealous of the trappings of monarchy. He has draped the Oval Office in gold, gilded the statues and monuments that mark the landscape of Washington D.C., pledged to build an enormous triumphal arch in his name and destroyed a large part of the White House to build an opulent presidential ballroom of immense size. As to the actual substance of his administration, Trump’s almost exclusive use of executive orders is tied up in his monarchical understanding of presidential power. The executive order, as he understands it, is less an interoffice memo than it is a royal decree to be swiftly obeyed, without question or challenge. That is one reason those orders cover vast territory, much of it beyond the president’s formal authority. His executive orders have sought to end diversity programs throughout the country, change school curriculums at the district level, commandeer state voting systems and rewrite the Constitution to limit the scope of citizenship.

The ambition of these orders is a testament to Trump’s self-understanding as a man of limitless power. It is not for nothing that in February 2025, the official White House account on X shared an A.I.-generated image of Trump as monarch with the caption reading in part, “Long Live the King.” In their book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” my news-side colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan recount a meeting with Trump during which he proudly showed them a document, written by a golf caddy and businessman, that claimed he was a more powerful figure than a host of notorious dictators and warlords, including Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan. Trump relished the comparison. With all of this noted, it is appropriate that King Trump, first of his name, would also seek to use the force of the state to punish those who question him, insult him or challenge his narrative of events — lèse-majesté, American-style. Trump has filed lawsuits against a number of news organizations, including ABC, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. In each case he claims he’s been defamed, but nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that he demands fealty to his vision of reality and that if you will not accept it, he will try to impose it. His most recent target is the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, which he has threatened with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit over a recent report that criticized and condemned his deployment of the National Guard in American cities. Trump claimed to send the Guard to cities such as Washington to address crime. But according to the center’s report, there is no statistically significant evidence that these deployments — which will cost more than $1.7 billion — have reduced crime rates. The article further details that Trump has also targeted other institutions, continuing his pattern of using legal threats to silence critics.