Clarence Thomas’ recent speech extolling the Declaration of Independence and Western civilization while warning of the existential threat of progressivism might instead have acknowledged the parallels between King George’s trespasses and Trump’s.
More-informed Americans may have heard of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ April 15, 2026, speech at the University of Texas-Austin as the 250 th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches. The arch-conservative Thomas lauded Texan institutions of higher learning for their “work to revitalize the teaching and research of Western civilization”; indeed, he asserted that the formal mission of UT-Austin is “to help students encounter the distinct inheritance of Western civilization.” In the next sentence, his jeremiad for the day became clear: “the very values” of that civilization, “announced” in the Declaration of Independence — “have fallen out of favor” and are now in existential danger from so-called progressives (For his entire speech and subsequent Q&A, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddqLhcmZ8Uk).
Notwithstanding that the defense of any particular civilization is not the mission of universities but rather the pursuit of knowledge by way of critical thinking, wherever that path may lead, the irony was that the very same university system lately banned Plato and other civilizational classics because of their putatively destructive effects on American and Western minds. Apparently, he is untroubled by the fact that many of the pillars of his beloved civilization, including Plato, and their values have fallen out of favor with conservative educators and activists.
But the heart of his diatribe — a diatribe as old as American conservativism itself — was that “progressivism” has undermined the commitment to the principle, stated in the Declaration, that our rights are endowed by some unnamed “creator” (presumably but not explicitly the Christian deity), thereby threatening our rights and our very American civilization. This is, of course, not what progressivism is about in any way; quite to the contrary, it is about finally realizing the lofty ideals in that document.
It is painfully apparent that nearly every major abuse and usurpation by King George III has been replicated by Trump as the country stumbles toward its 250 th birthday. This is probably why the “No Kings” movement has such resonance across American society: the Declaration of Independence is less about creator-bestowed rights (a polemic at best) than about listing the assaults against those rights by an authoritarian and monarchical character who, in the document’s words, “is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant” and therefore “is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
At the same time, he failed to note some other details of the opening paragraph of the Declaration—that all humans are equal, that those vaunted rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments which become destructive of those rights can and should be altered or abolished—all of which are being trampled by Trump, with the overt aid of Thomas and the conservative majority on the Court.
Donald Trump peeking at the Declaration of Independence in the Oval Office, March 2025—because if he looks at it too closely or too long, he could burst into flames. Public domain.
More interestingly and tellingly, like most Americans, Thomas has seemingly never read beyond those rousing opening words. What the Declaration actually does, the reason that it exists in the first place, is to enumerate the complaints against the English government that induced the patriots to seek independence at all. Let us consider some of these complaints and how they fare under the Trump/Thomas regime:
- The king “refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good”: Trump refuses to recognize or obey laws duly passed by Congress and the various states and attempts to rule by fiat and executive order.
- The king “has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws”: Trump interferes with state sovereignty, pressures governors (and mayors) to change their laws to conform to his whims, and threatens to withhold funds, to close or relocate institutions, or to send in troops if they do not obey.
- The king was guilty of “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners”: Trump daily violates immigration and naturalization law, firing immigration judges (and renaming them “deportation judges”), arresting people who are following the legal asylum process, deporting individuals who have committed no serious crime (who are not by any means “the worst of the worst”) to horrible places, and ignoring court orders to desist in all of these actions.
- The king “obstructed the Administration of Justice”: As just mentioned, Trump consistently disregards and violates court orders and has turned the Department of Justice into his personal vengeance machine, illicitly (and thankfully mostly unsuccessfully) attempting to prosecute critics and rivals while rewarding or pardoning supporters and cronies who have been properly convicted of crimes.
- The king “made Judges dependent on his Will alone”: Trump has corrupted the Supreme Court by appointing (often illegitimately, as when he was allowed to fill a seat that Obama should have been empowered to fill, on the flimsy premise that a president should not appoint a Justice in his final year in office—only to be allowed to appoint a second Justice mere weeks before the end of his own term) Justices who will bend and have bent to his will, basically granting him immunity for whatever absurd and loathsome behavior he chooses, and who side with him on almost all occasions. Trump also verbally attacks lower-court judges whose rulings displease him and tries to replace them, rather than simply ignoring their decisions.
- The king “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent swarms of Officers hither to harass our people”: DOGE, anyone?
- The king “has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures”: Speaking of swarms of officers, Trump has ordered a private army, under the guise of border security—namely, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents—into American cities, when such armed and masked officers have not been requested by city or state officials or have been expressly requested not to be sent. He has also threatened to use the actual military against such cities and states, in the name of some imagined or invented (or, in the worst case, engineered) “emergency.”
- The king “has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power”: Simultaneously with empowering ICE as a personal goon squad, Trump and his surrogate, Pete Hegseth, have hollowed out the leadership of the military and replaced it with incompetent loyalists who, like Hegseth himself, seem driven by only one mission—to inflict as much “lethality” as possible.
- The king subsequently “protect[ed]” his armed emissaries “from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States”: Trump’s Stormtroopers killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good in the streets of Minneapolis, while shooting and otherwise roughing up other American citizens. Note too, the Declaration does not limit this protection against executive violence only to citizens but to all “Inhabitants.”
- The king “cut off our Trade with all parts of the world.” Trump’s tariffs — finally mostly ruled illegal and unconstitutional by his pet Supreme Court — have obviously disrupted trade worldwide, engaging the U.S. in a vain trade war and, consequently, raising costs for every American. His ill-conceived war on Iran has further damaged world trade.
- The king “deprive[d] us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury”: Trump has arrested, held, penalized, and otherwise punished people—non-citizens and citizens alike—without trial, conviction, or often even charge. In the worst instance, he instructed the military to blow up small boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific on the allegation (without evidence) of transporting drug traffickers (which is not, by the way, a capital offense), amounting to extrajudicial murder.
- The king “excited domestic insurrections amongst us”: January 6 th, anyone?
It is painfully apparent that nearly every major abuse and usurpation by King George III has been replicated by Trump as the country stumbles toward its 250 th birthday. This is probably why the “No Kings” movement has such resonance across American society: the Declaration of Independence is less about creator-bestowed rights (a polemic at best) than about listing the assaults against those rights by an authoritarian and monarchical character who, in the document’s words, “is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant” and therefore “is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
In Thomas’ speech extolling the virtues of the Declaration of Independence, he assigned the greatest meaning to its closing words: “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” I think the most meaningful and potent words actually occur in the famous opening section, where the Founding Fathers commit themselves to — and urge on us, their progeny — this principle: when that train of abuses and usurpations clearly “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.”
Rather than siding with Trump, who clearly fancies himself a latter-day king (and not a Peter the Great but an Ivan the Terrible), Thomas and other supposed lovers of the Declaration and the Constitution should condemn Trump as unfit to be the ruler of a free people, while there is still something left of the people’s freedom. That cause is worthy of our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
Postcard image: An AI-generated—although only partly fictitious—image of Donald Trump destroying the Declaration of Independence. Created with ChatGPT
