Calmes: The president celebrates our nation’s founding while imitating tyrant King George III

It’s a measure of President Donald Trump’s lack of self-awareness — a superpower, really, for authoritarian demagogues like him who otherwise would shrink from their worst impulses — that he apparently doesn’t see the evident contradiction in his simultaneous support for protesters in Iran and damnation of those in his own country.

For days, Trump has preened as the all-powerful protector of Iranian protesters against their nation’s repressive regime. (The supposedly “America First” president could strike their country at any moment, if he hasn’t already.) “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he posted Tuesday. “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”

But what was on the way to Minneapolis, he’d posted just an hour earlier, was “RECKONING AND RETRIBUTION.” Its citizens — his citizens — were demonstrating in growing numbers against the paramilitary that Trump has created among Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, one of whom last week killed a woman there, Renee Nicole Good. Trump counterproductively increased the ICE deployment in the city, already more than triple the size of the Minneapolis police force.

On Sunday night, Trump had justified Good’s slaying this way: “The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement.” This from the man who watched on TV for three hours on Jan. 6, 2021, as demonstrators at the U.S. Capitol disrespected law enforcement with chemical sprays, poles, planks, fists and bike racks. And he did nothing. Because they were pro-Trump protesters. Once back in office, he pardoned nearly 1,600 of them.

‘Shameless contradictions’

On the fifth anniversary of that Trump-incited insurrection, last week, the White House website rewrote history to obscure what Americans saw in real time — a falsification that truly disrespected law enforcement. In Trump’s version, the heroic Capitol Police were the culprits for “aggressively” firing “tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber munitions into crowds of peaceful protestors.” Funny, not funny: That actually describes what ICE agents have been doing, as photos and numerous Americans’ videos on social media document, and not just in Minneapolis but in Chicago, Portland, Ore., Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans.

The “No Kings” rallies last fall? Trump, ever the brander, led his sycophants choir in Congress in renaming those events as “Hate America rallies,” and the 7 million peaceful protesters nationwide who attended them as communists and Marxists.

But here’s what makes the shameless contradictions in Trump’s stance on the right to protest even more nauseating in 2026: This is the year that the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the United States’ foundational act of anti-government protest.

It’s Americans’ bad fortune that such a man as Trump, a wannabe king, is the presider in chief for the yearlong commemorations of the rebellion that ultimately threw off a real king who’d met protesters with force and retribution.

Trump is so eager to be the semiquincentennial’s impresario that he’s already had the U.S. Mint produce a $1 coin with his likeness for the occasion. As if Americans needed a reminder that to Trump it’s all about him.

But he should take the time to actually read the document that this celebration commemorates. If he were self-aware, he’d see that he resembles the king the founders were opposing, and that his actions parallel those the founders cited as grounds for breaking away.

Their list of indictments of King George III include: “The establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” Think of Trump’s dispatch of federal agents and National Guard troops into blue states and cities, and his threats to send the military, over the objections of their governors and mayors, state legislators and members of Congress.

Then there’s this passage: The king has “sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people.” And this: “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.” More: He is “protecting them … from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.”

‘Spirit of 1776’

Protecting officers from the consequences of alleged murders? In an all but unprecedented break with usual protocols after a law enforcement action as controversial as Good’s killing, Trump’s administration refuses to cooperate with Minnesota local and state officials in simply investigating the ICE officer who shot Good three times, and is denying them access to evidence. Trump’s Justice Department — and he’s made it his Justice Department — has ruled out the usual civil rights probe. Instead, the administration continues to blame the victim, Good, and is investigating her and her partner in the hope of finding some ties to activist groups.

Fortunately, there’s blowback, which truly does reflect the spirit of 1776.

On Tuesday, at least six federal prosecutors resigned in protest and others in Minnesota and Washington reportedly are expediting plans to quit. Lawyers nationwide condemned White House henchman Stephen Miller for his false, provocative claims that ICE agents have immunity for their acts. Polls show that by wide margins Americans believe Good’s shooting was unjustified. Support for ICE continues to decline; pluralities of Americans now oppose it.

But what has to worry Trump most of all: He’s lost Joe Rogan, uber-podcaster, especially to white males, and a past supporter. “You don’t want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching people up — many of which turn out to actually be U.S. citizens that just don’t have their papers on them,” Rogan said on air this week. “Are we really gonna be the Gestapo, ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?”

Yes, it is. But as a consequence, protests are sure to continue, and build. What better year for that to be so: it’s not only the semiquincentennial but a midterm election year. As Trump likes to tell those he’s targeted — in Venezuela, Greenland and Iran — they can come around the easy way, or the hard way. The American people are giving him the same choice. He keeps choosing the hard way.

Jackie Calmes is an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times. ©2026 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.