There was never any doubt that America in 2026 would commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Revolution. The surprise is that the Trump administration has chosen to do so by playing the role of Britain’s occupying army.
The one Revolutionary particular that the Trump administration has most flagrantly opted to re-enact is the Boston Massacre: the 1770 killing of five Bostonians by British troops that had been occupying Boston since 1768. Trump has even replicated the initial British policy that first kindled Bostonians’ discontent: the Townshend Acts, which imposed tariffs on all British imports to the American colonies, thereby raising the prices Bostonians and other colonists had to pay for a wide range of goods.
The Massachusetts colonial legislature sent a petition to King George requesting the acts’ repeal; the British government responded by telling its appointed governors to dissolve any colonial legislatures that supported that petition. Boston’s British-appointed chief customs officer requested troops be sent to the city because, he wrote, “the Government is … in the hands of the people,” which was obviously contrary to Massachusetts’s status as a colony. Four regiments were sent, and two were still stationed in Boston in 1770.
On March 5 of that year, a British private clubbed a 13-year-old boy who’d been taunting him. A crowd assembled upon hearing the news. A unit of British soldiers was deployed to intimidate the crowd, and insults and objects were hurled at the troops. One of the troops ignored an order to not fire and shot into the crowd, quickly joined by other troops. Five Bostonians were killed and more were injured.
What happened thereafter makes clear that the Brits were more solicitous of the colonists than the Trump administration has been of its own citizens. The colonial government, on the orders of the British-appointed governor, arrested the eight soldiers who’d fired on the crowd and, under public pressure, withdrew the regiments from city streets, though they remained within Boston. The soldiers were tried before a jury of Bostonians; two were found guilty of manslaughter.
No comparable actions, of course, have been taken by the Trump administration, which has not even permitted Minneapolis’s police and district attorney to investigate the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. No civil rights investigation into Good’s death is active, and so far there is no Justice Department investigation into Pretti’s death, only two internal investigations by the Department of Homeland Security.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has pointed out this disparity, and argued that the example of the Boston Massacre and its legal aftermath influenced the nation’s Founders to write the kind of state government protections enshrined in the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. The massacre, Ellison said, was “in the mind of the framers of the Constitution … they would never have conceded the state’s authority to prosecute a federal officer. The states of the United States pre-date the United States. It is federal courts that are limited. Not state courts. State courts have plenary power.”
THERE ARE TWO FUNDAMENTAL REASONS, I believe, why the Trump administration accords fewer basic rights to its critics than colonial British occupiers did to their colonists. The first is the virtually unlimited expansion of presidential power by Trump and his underlings, rooted in the Supreme Court’s endorsement of overweening and unchecked executive power and Trump’s own unawareness and dismissal of any constitutional constraints on his actions. The second is the sheer hatred Trump and his key aides harbor toward their fellow Americans who oppose his rule, which exceeds anything the British felt toward Americans, save only during the last years of the Revolution in the Southern states.
For the most part, Trump’s war on immigrants and political opponents has been driven by his de facto prime minister, Stephen Miller. During Trump’s first term, Miller was the architect and overseer of the policy to separate small children from their parents at the border. In Trump’s current term, Miller has ordered ICE and other federal police to seize and deport at least 3,000 immigrants every day and led administration efforts to punish blue states for failing to comply with its war on immigrant communities and the cities that harbor them.
Almost immediately after Alex Pretti’s killing, Miller termed Pretti a “domestic terrorist”—terminology so contradicted by every bit of evidence that even the White House has been compelled to refuse to endorse it. But Miller’s a priori hatreds are nothing new. Speaking at Charlie Kirk’s funeral, he painted an apocalyptic picture of the administration’s critics and its war with them.
“To the enemy, I say this,” he began. “You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing … We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil … You have no idea the dragon you have awakened.”
No such rhetoric is to be found in the British government’s assessment of its colonists, even those colonists who led the Revolution. Miller’s speech is more akin to the exterminationist rants of Julius Streicher, the Third Reich’s foremost antisemitic ideologist, than it is to anything coming out of the British government during the American Revolution.
But Miller’s sentiments, and their echoes on right-wing mass and social media, are highlighted in recruitment ads for ICE and the Border Patrol, now expanding rapidly due to the $75 billion in funding received from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The ads term immigration to be an “invasion” and refer to immigrants as “enemies.” It should come as no surprise that that spirit is manifested daily by ICE and the Border Patrol.
That the Trump administration has embraced some modern-age fascist speech and action not found in the British response to our Revolution doesn’t mean that we should ignore all the ways that Trump and Co. are faithfully replicating those British abuses that compelled our founders to rebel. Our Declaration of Independence, which turns 250 this July, holds King George responsible for a chain of abuses. Among them:
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures;
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws;
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.
So when the next No Kings Day rallies are held, it should also be a No Occupying Armies Day, and a No Unpunished Murders Day. And if someone wants to point out that King Donald’s madness is having a greater effect on American policy than King George’s madness ever did on British policy, I wouldn’t stop them.