Who’s the Mad King Now?
Posted on: Jun 21, 2025 16:30 IST | Posted by: Nytimes
Supported by
Maureen Dowd
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington
Maybe the mad king, the other one, wasn’t so mad after all.
“George III is Abraham Lincoln compared to Trump,” said Rick Atkinson, who is vivifying the Revolutionary War in his mesmerizing histories “The British Are Coming” and “The Fate of the Day.” The latter, the second book in a planned trilogy, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for six weeks and is being devoured by lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
As the “No Kings” resistance among Democrats bristles, and as President Trump continues to defy limits on executive power, it is instructive to examine comparisons of President Trump to George III.
“George isn’t the ‘royal brute’ that Thomas Paine calls him in ‘Common Sense,’” Atkinson told me. “He’s not the ‘tyrant’ that Jefferson calls him in the Declaration of Independence, and he’s not the sinister idiot who runs across the stage in ‘Hamilton’ every night singing ‘You’ll Be Back.’”
(“And when push comes to shove, I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love!”)
Yes, George III had manic episodes that scared people — depicted in Alan Bennett’s “The Madness of George III,” a play made into a movie with Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren. Palace aides are unnerved when the king’s urine turns blue.
“He was in a straitjacket for a while, that’s how deranged he was,” Atkinson said. “His last 10 years were spent at Windsor, basically in a cell. He went blind and deaf. He had long white hair, white beard.”
King George was relentless about his runaway child, America.
“He’s ruthless,” Atkinson explained, “because he believes that if the American colonies are permitted to slip away, it will encourage insurrections in Ireland, in Canada, the British Sugar Islands, the West Indies, in India, and it’ll be the beginning of the end of the first British Empire, which has just been created. And it’s not going to happen on his watch.”
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