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It’s the reign of King Donald: now a people who fled cruel monarchs have their own | Martin Kettle

Donald Trump’s triumphal return to the White House was American political theatre on steroids. This was, of course, exactly the returning president’s intention. “Shock and awe” was the en vogue phrase in the Trump camp to describe it, as the president sought to obliterate the Biden era in a blizzard of executive presidential orders and day-one Maga movement payoffs.

Trump’s second inauguration was exceptionally well worked. Where or whether it all lands in the form of delivered policy is a different issue. To some, it may feel petty to note that the last US “shock and awe” exercise – the Iraq invasion of 2003 – also generated a feast of indelible images of American power. But that one certainly did not end well.

Trump’s return may have appeared within the bounds of a familiar framework of inauguration ceremonies. True, bitter weather drove the event indoors, and into the very same Capitol building on which Trump had encouraged the mob to march in 2021. But the formalities were observed in the way the constitution requires, and many judged Trump more subdued this time than in his 2017 speech – the one George W Bush dubbed “some weird shit”.

Yet behind the familiar rituals it was hard not to sense that an important shift is continuing in the way the US is governed. Trump is not, by any instinct or evidence, a conventional or continuity president. He is a narcissist, a bully, and a deal-seeker who desires no obligation towards others.

You could sense all this once again throughout Monday’s events. The professors and the textbooks have always told us that the US is a nation where governance is maintained by the clear separation of powers between the president, Congress and the courts. In many ways, it still is. Yet this week provided many glimpses into how that ideal is now being challenged by a less enviable reality, which will accelerate under Trump.

The US is a nation increasingly governed by a court. But this governing court is not a court of law. Trump’s grip on the top judges in the US supreme court, many of whom he appointed during his first term, is already tight and likely to now grow tighter. Instead, Trump governs by placing himself at the centre of a presidential court almost on the monarchical model.

Not all of this is down to Trump alone. During the past century, presidents like Franklin Roosevelt extended the presidency’s reach in economic and international affairs. After the Vietnam war, the historian Arthur Schlesinger called this the rise of the “imperial presidency”. But it has not stopped. In his David Frost interview, Richard Nixon argued that if a president approves something, it is not illegal. The supreme court gave this once unthinkable view its majority blessing last year, ruling that a president possesses absolute immunity for any official acts. One liberal justice, Sonia Sotomayor, said this made the president “a king above the law”.

And, with a king, there inevitably comes a court. With a king above the law, there comes a court for whom the law must ultimately be a secondary concern too. A royal court has no authority or self-interest to champion a different constitutional order that the king himself has rejected.

Boris Johnson arrives for the inauguration of Donald Trump at the US Capitol, 20 January 2025.

Unsurprisingly, modern democracies have grown unfamiliar with the dynamics of court rule. Yet in British history, royal courts were where power lay, decisions were made, rivalries fought out and where, not least in Tudor times, lives were sacrificed. Even when parliaments had become more entrenched in the 18th century, a court or king’s party battled for supremacy with the Commons or Lords.

This is exactly why George Washington himself might have recognised the court political system now flourishing around Trump as something approximating to the form of kingly governance against which he was driven to revolt nearly 250 years ago. Writing in 1967 on the origins of the American revolution, the US historian Bernard Bailyn argued that the rebellion was driven by the fear that the constitutional balance had been perverted by those around George III, with the encouragement of the king himself. Much of what Bailyn argued was on view in American politics this week, not least in the deeply feudal use of quasi-royal powers of pardon by both Trump and Joe Biden.

Royal courts could be extremely formal forms of government, as Louis XIV of France’s was. The duc de Saint-Simon wrote in his memoirs that the court’s formalities were so fixed that you knew exactly where Louis would be, and in whose company, at every hour of the day. But a court can also be more of a marketplace, where members of the royal family, ministers, advisers, favourites, flatterers, agents, fixers and hucksters vie for the sovereign’s attention and favour.

This was the kind of court on display for the inauguration. Some courtiers were there by right – the leaders of the houses of Congress, for instance. Some were there by kinship – the younger Trumps the equivalents of princes of the blood royal at Versailles. Others, like the former Democratic presidents, were present because it was their painful duty to be humiliated.

Plenty more, however, were there because they had bought their way in and want favours from Trump, who shamelessly marketises his political power. Nowhere more so than with the tech bosses who seek tax cuts and market share to advance their global interests.

The presence of British politicians loyal and admiring of Trump, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson (once a would-be king too) and Liz Truss among them, offered a further reminder about courts. Hangers-on from other lands will plot at foreign courts too.

The US is still a constitutional democracy. Most of its institutions work. Prof David Runciman’s bet before Trump’s first term that there will be a US presidential election on Tuesday 8 November 2072 remains intact, if a little shakier than when he first made it. No one can say for certain that JD Vance will be inaugurated as president four years from now, though that looks very possible.

Yet if Trump is serious about doing away with part of the US constitution – birthright citizenship – what other sections might he try to override? Such talk has richer soil in which to take root in a presidential courtier system than where powers are separated and the constitution venerated. That is why Trump will govern this way as much as he can. On Monday, he announced to his court that the golden age of America begins right now. If he had been in the Capitol, the Sun King would have understood what he was watching.