The Madness of Kings – A Semi-Quincentennial

The real anniversary

On July 4, 2026, the U.S. will celebrate its 250^th birthday. That’s the date in 1776, when leaders of the 13 original colonies signed a Declaration of Independence, announcing their intention to free themselves from British rule and establish a new nation. The document remains inspiring, especially its second paragraph which begins:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That 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…

1776 marked the pinnacle of American, democratic aspiration; it’s been downhill from there. The Revolutionary War was brutal. In addition to battle deaths, tens of thousands of soldiers on prison ships died from sickness. In the southern colonies, both sides of the conflict refused quarter, simply executing men who surrendered or were captured. To the north in Pennsylvania and New York, George Washington’s troops attacked Native American (Iroquois) villages to punish them for siding with the British, or to gain territory and resources.

After the war’s conclusion, the new American Constitution, ratified in 1788, enabled slavery and enshrined a deeply un-democratic system of election. The following century saw Indigenous genocide, invasion of Mexico, Civil War (among the most bloody in history), and, after a brief period of racial democracy, de jure segregation in the South that lasted until the 1960s. Since Jefferson, there has been an unbroken lineage of mediocre or worse presidents (save Lincoln and FDR), supine or corrupt legislators (again, with rare exceptions), and complacent, dishonest, or anti-democratic Supreme Court justices. In the last few years alone, during Democratic as well as Republican administrations, the U.S. has enabled genocide in Gaza, waged aggressive war in Iraq and Iran, kidnapped or murdered foreign nationals, violated principles of habeas corpus that date back to Magna Carta, and engaged in ecocide. Trump’s regime may be seen as the culmination of all this: Kakistocracy — rule by the worst, or better “pathocracy,” governance by a psychopathic minority.

The significance of July 4, 2026, therefore, is not that it will be the semi-quincentennial of the Declaration of Independence. The basic tenets of the document, contained in the three sentences cited above, are much more honored in the breach than in the observance. Instead, it’s the anniversary of the pathocracy. In both 1776 and 2026, madmen — King George III and President Donald Trump – each recklessly plunged their nations into war.

The madness of king George

Four years after assuming the crown in 1760, British King George III approved a series of parliamentary acts – chiefly taxes and tariffs – that alienated American colonists and aroused resistance. First there were the Sugar and Currency Acts, and then a year later in 1765, the Stamp Act, which required American colonists to pay for an official stamp to be affixed to all legal documents, as well as newspapers, books and playing cards. The Act aroused popular consternation both for the cost and perceived violation of the traditional “rights of Englishmen.” To the colonists, the Stamp Act and other tariffs represented “taxation without representation” since they had no representatives in the British parliament. (Each American colony had its own legislature and taxing authority.) Protests, sometimes violent, spread from Massachusetts to Georgia, leading at last to parliamentary repeal, approved by King George.

But that wasn’t the end of efforts by parliament and the king to extract money from the colonists and secure obeisance. There followed in 1773 the notorious Tea Tax which prompted direct action – the Boston Tea Party in which local members of the Sons of Liberty (a clandestine militia) dumped about 340 casks of tea belonging to the East India Company into Boston Harbor. In Philadelphia, another Tea Party convened to prevent the unloading of a shipment of tea from England. In response, the crown escalated the dispute by passage of what Americans called “The Intolerable Acts (1774) aimed mostly at Massachusetts. The Acts: 1) mandated that the Royal Navy and British Army blockade Boston harbor and occupy the city until colonists compensated the East India Company for the destroyed tea; 2) permitted the quartering of British troops in colonial homes and other private facilities; and 3)  directed that British officials or soldiers accused of capital crimes be charged and tried in British courts alone. That final provision became known in the colonies as “The Murder Act” because it effectively meant that any British official in America could get away with murder.

With anger in the colonies at a pitch, the king and parliament had one more chance to avoid war. In 1775, the Second Continental Congress passed the Olive Branch Petition entreating George to withdraw the Intolerable Acts and negotiate a lasting settlement. In exchange for British concessions, the colonists would reaffirm their existing allegiance to the Crown. Hoping to deflect blame to the king’s ministers, they attributed the ongoing disharmony to “just attention to our own preservation against those artful and cruel enemies, who abuse your royal confidence and authority for the purpose of effecting our destruction.” The king however, would have none of it; he never even read the petition. Instead, he issued on August 23, 1775 his own Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition, declaring the colonies “in open and avowed rebellion” and its leaders “traitors.” He further said that anyone in Britain abetting the rebels was also guilty of treason. Given that the penalty for treason was hanging (followed for good measure, by beheading), the Americans now had no way to step back from the abyss. What followed, on July 4, 1776, was the Declaration of Independence that included the following retort to King George: “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, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”  By 1783, the U.S. war for independence was over and Britain defeated.

American independence was considered at the time a catastrophe for Britain. The debt accrued to pay for the war led to inflation and political unrest at home. Loss of prestige emboldened Britian’s enemies and sparked a movement for independence in Ireland culminating in a major rebellion in 1798. (Unlike the American, the Irish Revolution was crushed, and it would be more than 100 years before an Irish republic emerged.) King George himself, weighed down by events in America and the emerging crisis in France, suffered in 1782, and again in 1788 recurrences of the mental and physical illnesses he first experienced in 1765. The breakdown in 1788 however, it was so severe that it triggered a regency crisis, forestalled a year later when the king made a sudden (though temporary) recovery. He would have three more major breakdowns; the last in 1811 led to a regency led by his son the Prince of Wales, the future George IV.

King George III was arrogant and self-satisfied as most kings are. (“It’s good to be king!” as Mel Brooks liked to say.) But he was also politically maladroit and mentally unfit for rule. Early in his reign, he was called “Farmer George” (he was interested in agronomy) sometimes with affection, often with ridicule, and later “mad King George.”  A caricature from 1782 by James Gilray shows the king as a farmyard ass with a fool’s cap, seated on his throne with wrists shackled and a sack beside him at left, containing his crown and scepter. Stunned by defeat in America, George had recently submitted but then withdrew a letter of abdication. Above the king’s head is a crest showing an ass with a crown on his back (in place of a cross) and the words “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (“Shame on him who thinks evil of it,“) the motto of the Order of the Garter, Britain’s highest level of knighthood, typically awarded the king. The crowd of conspirators pouring through the doors at right is led by Charles James Fox the prominent Whig politician in the form of a fox. He was a strong supporter of American independence, and a constant nuisance to the king. He and his comrades are compared by Gillray to Guy “Vaux” better known as Fawkes, leader of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the House of Lords in 1605. (The word “gunpowder” is visible on a barrel beneath the king’s throne.)  On the wall behind the mob is a portrait of Cataline (Lucius Sergius Catilina) the Roman politician who in 63 BCE led a failed conspiracy to seize the consulship.

The detail of the aristocratic donkey and donkey crest was clever – it was likely an inspiration for Francisco Goya’s plate 39 from Los Caprichos (1799), titled “And so was his grandfather (Asta su Abuelo),” which satirizes the penchant of wealthy Spaniards to devise crests and coats to arms to establish (false) noble lineages. The meaning of the crest in Gillray’s print like Goya’s capricho is that asses beget asses.

A caricature from 1786 shows George strolling a farmyard with Queen Charlotte near Windsor Castle, visible at upper right. A solder at left shoulders fruits instead of a musket. Charlotte feeds the chickens while George tends the pigs, oblivious to his human subjects. They are signaled by their absence; we see only the sign at upper right indicating that mantraps and spring guns have been set on the grounds to deter poachers. Below the sign is a flock of placid sheep.

A few years later, in 1792, a caricature by Richard Newton, shows the mad king as a “Bugaboo,” a slang term for small buggies as well as imaginary monsters – bogeymen — that terrify children. His carries Prime Minister Pitt on his back and his mouth is wide open, screaming the words “Guards/ Encampments! Proclamation! Spies! Spa Fields Bastille! Bristol Bastille! Birmingham Bastille! Manchester Bastille! Informers! Confinement Dungeons! Racks! Tortures! No Lenity! No Mercy! No Bribery! Not even Petticoat influence shall prevail!!!’” He has obviously been driven mad by the revolution in France (“Bastille!” “Bastille!” “Bastille!”) just as he was a decade before by the American one. He imagines revolutionary uprisings everywhere, from Spa-Field in London to Manchester, and fears the American and French revolutions presaged a British one. Pitt would help George slay the bugaboo.

During his fits of madness, George yelled imprecations of every kind, experienced hallucinations, heard voices and committed sexual improprieties. No satisfactory diagnosis has ever been offered, but “acute mania” (severe bi-polar disorder) is currently the most frequent. On one occasion in 1788, according to the King’s senior page:

“The King and Queen…were driving one day through Windsor Park, when the King stopped the horses, and, crying, ‘There he is,’ alighted. His Majesty then approached an oak, and when within a few yards of it, uncovered and advanced, bowing with the utmost respect, and then, seizing one of the lower branches, shook it heartily, as one shakes the hand of a friend….From the words that were uttered, the page learnt that George imagined he was discussing European politics with the King of Prussia!”

On another occasion, the king tried to strangle his son, the Prince of Wales, crying out that no one dare stop him speaking his mind. Soon after, he went to bed but upon waking “had still all the gestures and ravings of the most confirmed maniac, and a new noise in imitation of the howling of a dog. Then he became calmer and talked of religion and declared himself inspired.”

William Blake, plate 24, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, c. 1790-93. New York: Morgan Library

Even after his recovery in 1789, George imagined conspiracies everywhere. Beginning in 1792, following the formation of the democratic London Corresponding Society, the king’s ministers and parliament initiated prosecutions of journalists and anybody else who dared to speak ill of the crown and in support of the French Revolution. The net extended far and wide, even encompassing a little-known poet and prophet named William Blake. Masking his authorship of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake represented in it mad King Nebuchadnezzar as crowned Farmer George, “dwelling…with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee, until you know that the on High ruleth in the kingdom of men.” (Daniel 4:31-32)

The text below the mad king represents Blake’s response to monarchical rule: “One law for the lion and ox is oppression.” A law that targets everyone, regardless of power or weakness, wealth or poverty, inevitably helps the former and hurts the latter.  Take for example, laws that forbid public seizure of land or property. For the gentry, the law is the essence of even-handed justice; but for the displaced peasant – the victim of parliamentary enclosure – it is an injustice. It prevents redress of injury.  In the U.S. today, President Trump’s succession of executive orders banning affirmative action, cutting programs that support environmental justice, and undermining civil rights protection are examples of just such laws. For the mad president and his circle of pathocrats, oppression is not a means, it’s the end.

The madness of king Donald

Regular readers of Counterpunch will be aware of the ongoing debate about the nature of Trump’s presidency. There are those, like Melvin Goodman, who argue that Trump is not like other presidents and that he and should not be normalized:

“Two terms that make the Trump presidency unique in American history are ‘megalomania’ and ‘pathological narcissism….’ The invasion of Iran has exposed his combination of paranoia and lack of impulse control, which is now on display in a war that has no clear objectives and no end in sight.”

Another, equally astute observer last week argued otherwise. Ricard Rubenstein wrote that the Iran war is not the product of “Trump’s megalomania,” but of a deeply engrained Imperialism. In a pithy phrase, he concludes: “If the system that the leader serves is an empire, he or she will finally act like an emperor.” I’m no diplomat, but I agree with both Goodman and Rubenstein. The madness of king Donald matters, but so does the wider impetus for empire. The point has a well-known foundation in political theory.

Karl’s Marx’s great collaborator Frederick Engels, outlined the materialist view of history in 1880, in a little book called Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. It’s sometimes criticized for being dogmatic, but it wasn’t intended to be a full disquisition on the nature and prospects of socialism, just a handbook on how to quickly distinguish between airy dreams of harmony (“utopian” socialism) and practical programs (“scientific” socialism) that could in the right circumstances, lead to radical change. He said:

“The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure…. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.

In other words, social change isn’t just conjured out of the mind but constructed by real people – masses of them — in concrete historical circumstances of “production and exchange.” Thus, no individual alone can make a revolution or for that matter, prevent one. Nevertheless, change is created by people, and some are better positioned than others to make it – including for the worse. Madmen too make history.

Bad decisions by madmen or fools are generally not made in private. They are made in full view of everybody because the people making them are certain they are wise. Thus, in 2003, Bush (II) asked his Secretary of Defense, Colin Powell to present to the U.N. incontrovertible proof that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. When he came before the General Assembly, however, anybody with eyes in their head could see the photographic evidence revealed sanitation facilities, warehouses, and empty tractor trailers. In a similar vein, when Trump came before the nation — or at least a White House recording crew – and claimed that Iran was just weeks away from assembling a nuclear bomb at facilities he previously claimed were obliterated, nobody believed him. When he later said Iranian ballistic missile production was a direct threat to the U.S., nobody bought it. And when he shifted tack and said that he aimed to liberate the Iranian people – this from a man unperturbed by U.S. government murder of American protestors – Trump was mocked. But the die was cast and war commenced.

Like his other actions – so capricious it’s hard to call them policies – Trump’s choice to go to war against Iran was the product of his madness. One month, Trump was stumping for a Nobel Peace Prize (falsely claiming to have stopped wars across the globe) and the next he was kidnapping the president of Venezuela and waging war against Iran. What motivated the change from Jekyll to Hyde? Pique and pathology. In a letter to the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, he wrote: “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.” Like a junkie in constant need of a fix, Trump’s ego – his pathological narcissism — must be regularly stoked, either by the immeasurable praise of others or by the spectacle of subjugating nations.

The successful pathocrat is abetted by others. To his allies, advisors and enablers – Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Steven Cheung, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance and others (themselves psychopaths or on the spectrum) — the president is confident and courageous, not narcissistic and impulsive; he is bold and imaginative not reckless and capricious. Other followers and admirers of Trump, indeed the mass of Republican voters, find him entertaining and refreshing. His racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia are ignored by them, overlooked, discredited or weakly apologized for: “Sometimes he talks without thinking.” But his obvious electoral success, they decide, proves the reasonableness of his actions and claims. Thus, Trump’s madness is adjudged a form of reason.

But Rubenstein is also right. An economic, political and military system designed to support American global dominance – imperialism — will inevitably go to war to achieve its aims. That’s what Sue Coe shows in her caricature of Trump at the top of this column. Inspired by Newton’s Bugaboo, Backpacks reveals the violence of a pathocrat in pursuit of empire. King Donald is shown raging. He spits tomahawk missiles on a schoolgirl wearing a backpack, as actually occurred on February 28, when American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them schoolgirls aged seven to 12, at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran.

On Trump’s back is a leaky oil drum representing, the artist told me, the Saudi Investment Fund. The fund has $950 billion in assets, and is seen by Trump, his family and circle of cronies as a pocket to be picked. Trump’s son, Don Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have all secured sizable Saudi investments in the equity funds they manage. The Trump family has also tapped other Mideast petro-state sovereign funds. Trump himself is seeking to control Iranian oil assets, like he already has Venezuelan, though there is limited legal basis for transferring other nations’ oil assets into the U.S. treasury.  Note that while willful and murderous, Trump has a bit in his mouth indicating that like a horse, mule, donkey or ox, he is driven by an external force – in this case the mad drive for wealth and empire.

At the time of its founding 250 years ago, the U.S. was not an empire, though it was the colonial outpost on an imperial regime. For the following 150 years, the U.K. and U.S. vied for economic and political hegemony. At last, after World War II, and certainly by the 1960s, the U.S. empire was secured and the British destroyed. But that history itself exposes a truth that offer modest hope in the current context. Empire is not forever. The very violence it engenders – at home and abroad – spurs resistance that grows until the monster is beaten back. So too, the pathocrat himself cannot long prevail. His impulsiveness, brutality and amorality generate intense opposition among the majority that retains moral scruples and the capacity for empathy. The turn against Trump in the U.S. – he is already deeply unpopular, indeed reviled abroad – suggests that his downfall has already begun, though the final denouement may be nasty, brutish and protracted.

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