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Two kings. Two tantrums. Two men so catastrophically, weapons-grade feckless that history didn’t just repeat itself — it did it louder, in a spray tan, with a worse haircut.
We’re putting King George III — the pink, porphyria-riddled, purple-peeing ham who lost America — side by side with our current President — the bronzer-drenched, tie-elongated, six-times-bankrupt Cheeto who tried to steal it back.
One of them sent an army when he didn’t get his way.
The other sent a mob in Viking helmets.
We built an entire country — this country — to escape one of these knuckleheads.
So what exactly is our excuse for the other one?
History doesn’t repeat itself.
It just keeps doing the same dumb fart joke, louder, in church, until somebody finally cleans it up — and then it waits five minutes and does it again, directly into the collection plate.
What we’re about to do is hold up two of the most catastrophically dim-witted, galaxy-brained, weapons-grade feckless men ever to have other people do their laundry for them. Side by side. Under the cold, unforgiving fluorescent light of:
“Are you actually kidding me right now.”
King George III of England.
And our President — whose mirror he kisses goodnight and probably tucks in.
Two kings. Two tantrums. Zero self-awareness between them.
King George III squirted into the world in 1738 as the most privileged baby in the history of babies — and babies, let me remind you, are already the most self-absorbed creatures on the planet before they’ve had even five minutes to develop a personality.
This particular baby got handed an empire before he was old enough to shave correctly, and spent the next sixty years proving, with a consistency that almost demands a standing ovation, that being born rich and powerful doesn’t make you smart.
It makes you a pink, pigheaded, wig-wearing ham with a crown on top, absolutely convinced God personally slid him a DM about the job.
The man taxing your tea had lavender pee the color of a Cadbury wrapper.
Our President arrived in 1946 in Queens, New York — a fine borough that has produced many excellent humans and one truly extraordinary argument for the nurture side of the nature-versus-nurture debate.
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His daddy gave him so much money he was technically a millionaire before he could legally drink — a fact which keeps escaping its enclosure and wandering back into every conversation like a raccoon that found the buffet.
He looks like what happens if you ask a child to draw a picture of a rich man, and then the drawing becomes sentient and gets a spray tan. He is the color of a traffic cone left in a parking lot since 1987. His hair — and we are obligated by journalistic principle to discuss the hair — sits on his head like a small, furious animal that gave up trying to escape but still hasn’t made peace with the situation.
It is the physical manifestation of a man who has never once accepted something plainly obvious to everyone else in the room.
George III: pink ham in a chandelier hat.
Our President: a Cheeto in a necktie built for a very insecure giraffe.
Both men dressed like their outfits were doing the governing. Both men were right.
George III heard “no” from the colonies — a totally reasonable, legally grounded, precedented “no” about taxation and representation — and sent an army. Not a negotiating team. Not a letter. An army. Plus Hessian mercenaries, because he outsourced the violence to Germans, which is either entrepreneurial or sociopathic, and honestly at some point the distinction stops mattering.
The idea that a bunch of Virginia farmers could tell the King of England to go pound his wig was so catastrophically incompatible with his self-image that violence was the only available emotional response.
Our President heard “no” from seven million more voters than said “yes” — and filed sixty-one lawsuits. Lost sixty of them.
A legal batting average so catastrophically bad that if it were a baseball statistic, they’d have burned the jersey.
Then he called Georgia’s Secretary of State — on a recorded phone call, because this man spent decades on reality television where everything is recorded and somehow forgot that applies to actual reality too — and asked him to please just “find” eleven thousand votes.
That’s not how votes work. That’s not how any of this works. That’s not how numbers work.
And then the mob. The actual mob.
January 6th. Viking helmets. Zip ties. Feces on the walls of the United States Capitol building — while he watched it on television and, according to multiple witnesses, thought it was going pretty well, actually.
George III lost a colony.
Our President tried to steal the same country.
George III was callous about the people he threw at his problems.
Our President told his mob he loved them — which is cruelty with better production values.
I’m not coating this in anything.
George III was over there. His tyranny had to cross an ocean. And we built a revolution to stop it — and then we wrote down the instructions so it could never happen from the inside.
The Constitution is fundamentally a George III Prevention Document.
The Founders sat down and said: we know exactly what happens when one man has too much power and too little accountability — we just lived through it, here are the instructions, please do not be idiots.
And then we elected our President. Twice. The second time after January 6th. After the documents. After the phone calls. After the feces on the walls. After all of it. And a substantial portion of this country looked at the full picture and said:
“Yes please. More. We’d like seconds.”
The Constitution didn’t fail. The system held — barely, by its fingernails, with people being chased through hallways inside it.
We failed. The people who were supposed to read the warning label that George III’s entire catastrophe was written as.
George III was a bad king who accidentally made us great.
Our President was a bad president we accidentally made ourselves.
King George III: purple-peeing, empire-fumbling, army-dispatching, weasel-fur-wearing, porphyria-riddled, ham-faced international cautionary tale — who at least had the dignity of centuries of institutional pageantry propping up his colossal incompetence. His greatest contribution to history was being so spectacularly, operatically, magnificently awful that he accidentally inspired the greatest governing document of the modern age.
More than most people accomplish.
Even if he did it entirely by being a first-class dimwit.
Our President: bronzer-drenched, tie-elongating, six-times-bankrupt, fake-university-operating, Sharpie-wielding, election-contesting, nuclear-code-accessing, feces-wall-inspiring, golf-cart-riding monument to what happens when a country forgets exactly why it got rid of kings in the first place — whose purple moments come not from a hereditary blood disorder but from spray tan clogging something, which is the less dignified origin story, and that is genuinely saying something.
Two kings. Two tantrums. One species.
We built a whole country to escape one of them.
What’s our excuse for the other?
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