A close reading of the Declaration of Independence demonstrates that if the Founders were alive today, they would probably be doing all they could to remove Trump from office. The declaration affirms 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.” It then turns to the origins and purpose of legitimate governments: “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The heart of the declaration, however, is devoted to a third point, one all too relevant today: how and when governments lose their legitimate authority. Governments are not dissolved “for light and transient causes” but only “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” If the evidence all points in the same direction, then the people can and must act to defend their liberties. That’s why the rest of the declaration—the bulk of the text—laid out the king’s “long train of abuses and usurpations” to demonstrate that he sought “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny.” A large number of the grievances concern the right of the Colonial legislatures to meet and consent to laws and taxation. To our Founders, there was a causal relationship between legislative consent and liberty. Today, we often think freedom is the ability to do what one wants. To our Founders, in contrast, freedom was a collective possession, not a private one. Freedom was only possible in a free state in which the people or their representatives actively made the rules that govern their shared life.
The primary goal of the declaration, then, was to prove “to a candid world” that the king of Great Britain had continuously and regularly placed his will above the law by bypassing the constitutional authority of the Colonial legislatures and violating English liberties. As a result, the colonists were absolved of their allegiance to him. The declaration thus concludes, “a Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
By disregarding Congress and repeatedly violating laws, Trump has produced a revolutionary crisis much like the one the colonists faced 250 years ago. He, too, is unfit to rule over a free people. We are thus in a much more serious situation than many politicians or journalists will admit: The scale of Trump’s crimes against American liberties rival those of king and Parliament in the 1770s.