The 250th anniversary of America’s liberation from a king kicked off with a campaign-style rally on the National Mall by President Trump, whose face already stares down from banners fluttering from federal buildings across the nation’s capital.
The images illustrate how the president has dominated daily life since returning to power, evoking more the style of a monarch than the leader of the world’s oldest democracy. But more than anything, it is how he has wielded that power that has led to comparisons of an imperial reign.
Since returning to office in January 2025, Trump has nominated one of his personal lawyers to serve as attorney general, ordered the Department of Justice to pursue his political enemies, deployed the U.S. Marines to the nation’s second largest city and leveraged the presidency to enrich himself and his family.
He has demanded that comedians who mock him be fired, has slapped his name on the Kennedy Center, has pushed to seize control of elections, has filed lawsuits against news organizations whose coverage he disliked and has sued his own government seeking $10 billion in taxpayer money.
Trump also is the only convicted felon to hold the presidency, and a separate felony indictment over his attempts to keep himself in power after losing the 2020 election was dismissed only after he was reelected four years later despite those facts.
With the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding approaching, Trump’s own celebrations have overshadowed the bipartisan, congressionally authorized commission that was supposed to coordinate events commemorating the moment. He plans to return to the National Mall on July Fourth for what he calls a “Trump rally.”
The president’s actions have led to comparisons with King George III, the British monarch whose rule inspired the American Revolution. It is a parallel Trump rejects.
“I’m not a king,” he told CBS’ “60 Minutes” earlier this year. “If I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.”
A different view of the presidency
There is a long American political traditional of opponents reviling presidents as kings. But Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University historian, said the label fits differently on Trump.
“It’s more about how he imagines who is he and what the presidency is,” Zelizer said. “We’re celebrating founding principles, and that was a driving issue — fears of how a centralized power can be corrupted. And here we are again.”
When King Charles III visited Trump this year, the official White House X account posted an image of the two men with the caption “Two Kings.” At the start of his second term, Trump declared he had ended a New York City transportation program and posted: “LONG LIVE THE KING.” The posts also seemed to indicate a willingness to leverage the label and the reaction it provokes in his critics.
The main resistance movement in Trump’s second term has adopted the slogan “No Kings.” Ezra Levin of the group Indivisible said activists were thinking ahead to 2026 and the America 250 celebration when they chose the label.
“It looks like the same kind of tyranny we were rebelling against 250 years ago, the type of domination of Americans by a secret police force that’s murdering people in the streets like in Minneapolis this year and in Boston in 1770,” Levin said, referring to demonstrations against the administration’s immigration crackdown that led to the fatal shootings of two protesters this year by federal officers.
When asked for comment, the White House referred to Trump’s statements about his use of executive power. The president has weighed in multiple times defending his maximalist approach.
During his first term, he referred to Article II of the Constitution when he told participants in a youth summit, “I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” while declaring that it “gives me all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before.” He told the New York Times in an interview this year that the only check on his global power was “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Yet he also has said that portrayals of his approach as authoritarian were wrong: “I’m not a dictator,” he told reporters last year. In response to a question about whether he was concentrating power in the presidency, Trump told Time in an interview last year, “I don’t think so. I think I’m using it properly, and I’m also using it as per my election.”
Supreme Court has sided with him
With a deferential, Republican-controlled Congress, courts have become the last check on Trump. The president has harshly criticized judges who have ruled against him, and his administration has sometimes defied their orders.
Yet his quest to expand presidential power has been aided by the conservative majority — including three of his appointees — on the U.S. Supreme Court, which has sided with Trump numerous times after lower court rulings hampered him.
In the middle of his 2024 campaign, the high court ruled that presidents have broad immunity from prosecution. The decision derailed multiple investigations stemming from Trump’s first term, including the one focused on his attempts to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Trump has argued the courts cannot constrain the president on key issues, including his claims that he has the ability to fire members of independent agencies. The most notorious example was in 2024, when a judge asked during the immunity case whether a president could be prosecuted for ordering the assassination of a political rival. Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, answered with a “qualified yes.”
Sauer is now solicitor general, the administration official who oversees arguments before the high court. He has continued to insist that courts cannot review presidential acts.
“Once the president has made a determination … at that point, there’s no work for the reviewing court to do,” Sauer said during Supreme Court arguments in a case over whether Trump could fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor.
But the Supreme Court has allowed Cook to remain on the board while it considers the case. The majority also slapped down his global tariffs, finding that only Congress had the authority to impose them.
Such rulings demonstrate that presidential power does have its limits, according to John Yoo, a conservative law professor at UC Berkeley who served in the George W. Bush administration.
“The presidency today, even when colored by President Trump’s worst excesses, is not a monarchy,” he said.
Direct financial enrichment
Trump was the richest man to ever become president. During his first term, he was criticized for owning properties where foreign dignitaries and others hoping to curry his favor spent lavishly. The conflicts of interest have escalated in his second term.
Trump launched cryptocurrencies before and after returning to office. By conservative estimates, one has pulled in $320 million this year alone, while another sold $550 million worth of tokens. A third received a $2-billion investment from a foreign wealth fund.
Trump took a new step earlier this year, filing a private $10-billion lawsuit against the IRS for the leak of his tax returns during his first term. His Department of Justice directed the IRS to settle the litigation to create a $1.776-billion fund to pay damages to people who claimed the federal government unfairly prosecuted them.
The administration pulled back the settlement amid an outcry from congressional Democrats and some Republicans. But Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Trump who is now acting attorney general, said at least one provision remains — a ban on the IRS auditing Trump.
Zelizer said Trump’s financial entanglements might be the most monarchical part of his administration.
“We have not seen a person who has a business operation of this scale and scope benefiting directly from the decisions he makes,” Zelizer said.
Targeting political rivals
The Justice Department’s role in the IRS lawsuit is one example of how Trump has decreed that executive branch employees should act as agents of his will.
In breaching what is supposed to be a firewall between the White House and Justice Department, Trump has demanded that federal prosecutors target his foes. In one social media post last year, he called out by name Pam Bondi, who was attorney general at the time, in pushing her to prosecute several of his political opponents: “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Trump wrote.
Indictments followed shortly after, including against former FBI Director James B. Comey and New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James. The charges against both eventually were dismissed, but the department under Blanche filed new charges against Comey.
The pursuit is not limited to Trump enemies of the past.
For his 80th birthday this month, the president hosted a fight held by UFC — a company he invested in — on the White House lawn. The event was broadcast on a network owned by the son of one of the president’s major donors. The spectacle drew a rebuke from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a persistent critic and potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender.
“The White House was built to serve the American people. Tonight it was used to promote a company the President owns stock in, sell subscriptions, promote corporate sponsors, push Trump crypto, and enrich the President and his family,” Newsom wrote on X. “The founders warned us about kings enriching themselves from public office.”
Days later, Newsom disclosed that Trump’s Department of Justice was investigating him and his wife.
Riccardi writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Lindsay Whitehurst and Fatima Hussein contributed to this report.
Trump and DOJ ask Supreme Court to toss $83 million defamation verdict in E. Jean Carroll case
WASHINGTON — President Trump and the Justice Department are asking the Supreme Court to toss an $83 million defamation verdict won by writer E. Jean Carroll after she accused him of sexual assault, saying he can’t be sued for comments he made while he was president.
It’s the second time Trump has asked the justices to nix damages awarded by a jury to Carroll, a longtime advice columnist and former TV talk show host. The Supreme Court refused in June to hear his appeal of another verdict, for $5 million, that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
The latest case centers on comments Trump made during his first term as president. The Justice Department wants to invoke the Westfall Act, which shields government employees from being sued for doing their jobs.
“Absent this Court’s intervention, the sitting President is facing nearly a hundred million dollars of personal liability for conduct that was well within the scope of his federal office,” federal attorneys wrote. “That alone deserves this Court’s attention.”
The appeal was filed electronically and is expected to be formally docketed with the court Wednesday.
Trump’s lawyers, meanwhile, argued that an appeals court “engaged in procedural contortions” to avoid addressing Trump’s claims that presidential immunity protects him from the $83 million award because he made the statements in question in 2019 while he was president.
The lawyers argued that the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled in a manner that “cries out for this Court’s review in this unprecedented case” and called the damages “grossly excessive.”
“This is the first case in our nation’s history in which a court has imposed damages liability on a president for his conduct in office,” the lawyers wrote.
Carroll’s lawyers have declined to comment on the latest Trump filing.
Trump has long argued he cannot be sued over comments he made about Carroll during his first term where he disavowed knowing her and attacked her motivations for going public with her story in a recent memoir. He’s also asking the Supreme Court justices to reconsider their rejection of his appeal in the $5 million verdict.
The appeal comes about two years after the Supreme Court granted Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president.
Carroll testified twice before New York juries that Trump sexually assaulted her in spring 1996 in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury retailer across the street from Trump Tower. She first went public with the claims in a 2019 memoir.
She sued Trump for defamation after he accused her of making up the allegation to help book sales, adding that he’d never met her and “she’s not my type.” He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
A Manhattan jury awarded her $83 million in damages in January 2024. Lower courts have so far rejected Trump’s appeals to overturn the verdict, though the New York-based appeals court split over the decision and agreed to delay that payout until the Supreme Court weighs in.
In 2023, another jury said Carroll was entitled to $5 million after concluding that Trump had subjected her to sexual abuse in the department store encounter and for defamation for remarks he had made after his first term ended. That judgment has been paid.
The Associated Press does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.
Whitehurst and Neumeister write for the Associated Press. Neumeister reported from New York.
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Trump is taking longer to approve disaster aid and denying Democratic states more frequently
When major disasters strike, Americans are routinely waiting weeks — or even months — to receive presidential approval for aid. And if they live in a state that didn’t support President Trump, chances are greater that aid will be denied.
Since taking office last year, Trump has approved about 65 requests for major disaster declarations and denied more than two dozen others from states, tribes or territories seeking federal financial assistance following hurricanes, tornadoes, storms, floods and fires.
Trump has taken longer on average to approve disaster requests than any other president, according to an Associated Press analysis of data dating back to 1989, when a federal law setting new parameters for disaster determinations was implemented. And no other president has such a disparity in denials between states that supported him politically and those that did not.
The delays and denials come as Trump’s administration contemplates a makeover of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which administers disaster aid. Major disaster declarations are intended for events that are beyond the resources of state and local governments.
Trump is saying yes to Republicans more than Democrats
During his second term, Trump has denied a greater percentage of disaster requests than any president dating to 1989. Those denials have not been evenly distributed among states.
Trump has approved 80% of the disaster requests from Republican governors but only about 60% from Democratic governors, according to the AP’s analysis of FEMA data.
The discrepancy is even more apparent when analyzing major disaster declarations based on presidential elections. Trump has approved more than three-fourths of the requests from states that voted for him in the 2024 election but less than half the requests from states that did not. Although there are federal criteria for disaster aid, decisions ultimately are at the president’s discretion.
A batch of denials earlier this month included four Democratic states — Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island — seeking federal aid for a February snowstorm.
“The President’s denial is part of a pattern of extreme partisanship as he tries to shift a heavier economic burden onto blue states. Disaster aid should be merit-based, not politicized,” Rhode Island’s Democratic U.S. Senate and House members said in a joint statement.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that “there is no politicization to the President’s decisions on disaster relief.”
During his first term, Trump actually approved a greater share of requests from states that had opposed him than those that supported him.
Yet no other president had such a wide partisan divide in disaster declarations as currently exists under Trump. Obama approved 87% of the disaster requests from Democratic governors during his second term and 79% from Republican governors, but Obama’s approval rate was identical for states that voted for and against him.
When requests are denied, individuals, insurers and local governments are left to shoulder the costs themselves.
Trump is waiting longer to declare disasters
Since Trump assumed office last year, it’s taken him an average of a month and a half to approve major disaster declarations after receiving a request from the governor or chief executive of a state, territory or tribe, the AP found. Because it can take several weeks after a disaster for officials to inspect the damage and submit a request, the total wait time often has exceeded two months.
By comparison, Trump approved major disaster requests in an average of about three weeks during his first term, a pace similar to President Joe Biden. Their predecessors — Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton and George H.W. Bush — all had average disaster approval times of less than two weeks.
All presidents have taken longer to approve some requests. But that’s become the norm in Trump’s second term. Of Trump’s approvals, 70% have taken at least a month — up from about one-quarter of requests during Trump’s first term and Biden’s administration, and fewer than 10% under their predecessors.
Jackson said that Trump conducts a more thorough review than any administration before him, “ensuring American tax dollars are used appropriately and efficiently by the states to supplement — not substitute — their obligation to respond to and recover from disasters.”
The longer the approval process takes, the longer people must wait to receive federal aid for daily living expenses, temporary lodging and home repairs. Delays in major disaster declarations also can hamper recovery efforts by local officials uncertain whether they will receive federal reimbursement for cleaning up debris and rebuilding infrastructure.
FEMA nominee is pledging faster decisions
FEMA has had four different temporary leaders since Trump took office in January 2025. One of those, Cameron Hamilton, is awaiting Senate confirmation as the agency’s permanent director.
During a Senate committee hearing last month, Hamilton said he would try to speed up disaster declaration decisions and reimbursements. He also pledged to ensure that FEMA is objective, fair and reasonable in reviewing disaster declaration requests and making recommendations to the president.
Hamilton, a former Navy SEAL, had been fired as FEMA’s acting director in May 2025 after publicly disagreeing with Trump’s idea of dismantling the agency. His reemergence signals that Trump now may support changes to FEMA instead of an outright elimination of the agency.
Panel’s recommendations could lead to more denials
A council appointed by Trump has recommended a series of changes to FEMA that would shift greater responsibility to states, potentially reducing the number of major disaster declarations and the amount of federal money paid out.
The council suggested revised criteria to qualify for presidential declarations, including a prerequisite of annual minimum expenditures by states, territories and tribes.
Another recommendation, which would require congressional approval, would reduce the federal government’s share of the disaster aid from a minimum of 75% to 50% of the costs, leaving state and local governments more to cover. For governments approved for assistance, federal funding could get there quicker — within 30 days of a federal disaster declaration, instead of waiting months or years for reimbursements that are based on proof of expenditures.
For individuals, the council recommended consolidating several different types of aid into one payment targeted for those whose homes are uninhabitable.
Lieb and Wildeman write for the Associated Press.
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America split from monarchy 250 years ago. Trump’s presidency is testing how far it’s come
The 250th anniversary of America’s liberation from a king kicked off with a campaign-style rally on the National Mall by President Trump, whose face already stares down from banners fluttering from federal buildings across the nation’s capital.
The images illustrate how the president has dominated daily life since returning to power, evoking more the style of a monarch than the leader of the world’s oldest democracy. But more than anything, it is how he has wielded that power that has led to comparisons of an imperial reign.
Since returning to office in January 2025, Trump has nominated one of his personal lawyers to serve as attorney general, ordered the Department of Justice to pursue his political enemies, deployed the U.S. Marines to the nation’s second largest city and leveraged the presidency to enrich himself and his family.
He has demanded that comedians who mock him be fired, has slapped his name on the Kennedy Center, has pushed to seize control of elections, has filed lawsuits against news organizations whose coverage he disliked and has sued his own government seeking $10 billion in taxpayer money.
Trump also is the only convicted felon to hold the presidency, and a separate felony indictment over his attempts to keep himself in power after losing the 2020 election was dismissed only after he was reelected four years later despite those facts.
With the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding approaching, Trump’s own celebrations have overshadowed the bipartisan, congressionally authorized commission that was supposed to coordinate events commemorating the moment. He plans to return to the National Mall on July Fourth for what he calls a “Trump rally.”
The president’s actions have led to comparisons with King George III, the British monarch whose rule inspired the American Revolution. It is a parallel Trump rejects.
“I’m not a king,” he told CBS’ “60 Minutes” earlier this year. “If I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.”
A different view of the presidency
There is a long American political traditional of opponents reviling presidents as kings. But Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University historian, said the label fits differently on Trump.
“It’s more about how he imagines who is he and what the presidency is,” Zelizer said. “We’re celebrating founding principles, and that was a driving issue — fears of how a centralized power can be corrupted. And here we are again.”
When King Charles III visited Trump this year, the official White House X account posted an image of the two men with the caption “Two Kings.” At the start of his second term, Trump declared he had ended a New York City transportation program and posted: “LONG LIVE THE KING.” The posts also seemed to indicate a willingness to leverage the label and the reaction it provokes in his critics.
The main resistance movement in Trump’s second term has adopted the slogan “No Kings.” Ezra Levin of the group Indivisible said activists were thinking ahead to 2026 and the America 250 celebration when they chose the label.
“It looks like the same kind of tyranny we were rebelling against 250 years ago, the type of domination of Americans by a secret police force that’s murdering people in the streets like in Minneapolis this year and in Boston in 1770,” Levin said, referring to demonstrations against the administration’s immigration crackdown that led to the fatal shootings of two protesters this year by federal officers.
When asked for comment, the White House referred to Trump’s statements about his use of executive power. The president has weighed in multiple times defending his maximalist approach.
During his first term, he referred to Article II of the Constitution when he told participants in a youth summit, “I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” while declaring that it “gives me all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before.” He told the New York Times in an interview this year that the only check on his global power was “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Yet he also has said that portrayals of his approach as authoritarian were wrong: “I’m not a dictator,” he told reporters last year. In response to a question about whether he was concentrating power in the presidency, Trump told Time in an interview last year, “I don’t think so. I think I’m using it properly, and I’m also using it as per my election.”
Supreme Court has sided with him
With a deferential, Republican-controlled Congress, courts have become the last check on Trump. The president has harshly criticized judges who have ruled against him, and his administration has sometimes defied their orders.
Yet his quest to expand presidential power has been aided by the conservative majority — including three of his appointees — on the U.S. Supreme Court, which has sided with Trump numerous times after lower court rulings hampered him.
In the middle of his 2024 campaign, the high court ruled that presidents have broad immunity from prosecution. The decision derailed multiple investigations stemming from Trump’s first term, including the one focused on his attempts to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Trump has argued the courts cannot constrain the president on key issues, including his claims that he has the ability to fire members of independent agencies. The most notorious example was in 2024, when a judge asked during the immunity case whether a president could be prosecuted for ordering the assassination of a political rival. Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, answered with a “qualified yes.”
Sauer is now solicitor general, the administration official who oversees arguments before the high court. He has continued to insist that courts cannot review presidential acts.
“Once the president has made a determination … at that point, there’s no work for the reviewing court to do,” Sauer said during Supreme Court arguments in a case over whether Trump could fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor.
But the Supreme Court has allowed Cook to remain on the board while it considers the case. The majority also slapped down his global tariffs, finding that only Congress had the authority to impose them.
Such rulings demonstrate that presidential power does have its limits, according to John Yoo, a conservative law professor at UC Berkeley who served in the George W. Bush administration.
“The presidency today, even when colored by President Trump’s worst excesses, is not a monarchy,” he said.
Direct financial enrichment
Trump was the richest man to ever become president. During his first term, he was criticized for owning properties where foreign dignitaries and others hoping to curry his favor spent lavishly. The conflicts of interest have escalated in his second term.
Trump launched cryptocurrencies before and after returning to office. By conservative estimates, one has pulled in $320 million this year alone, while another sold $550 million worth of tokens. A third received a $2-billion investment from a foreign wealth fund.
Trump took a new step earlier this year, filing a private $10-billion lawsuit against the IRS for the leak of his tax returns during his first term. His Department of Justice directed the IRS to settle the litigation to create a $1.776-billion fund to pay damages to people who claimed the federal government unfairly prosecuted them.
The administration pulled back the settlement amid an outcry from congressional Democrats and some Republicans. But Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Trump who is now acting attorney general, said at least one provision remains — a ban on the IRS auditing Trump.
Zelizer said Trump’s financial entanglements might be the most monarchical part of his administration.
“We have not seen a person who has a business operation of this scale and scope benefiting directly from the decisions he makes,” Zelizer said.
Targeting political rivals
The Justice Department’s role in the IRS lawsuit is one example of how Trump has decreed that executive branch employees should act as agents of his will.
In breaching what is supposed to be a firewall between the White House and Justice Department, Trump has demanded that federal prosecutors target his foes. In one social media post last year, he called out by name Pam Bondi, who was attorney general at the time, in pushing her to prosecute several of his political opponents: “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Trump wrote.
Indictments followed shortly after, including against former FBI Director James B. Comey and New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James. The charges against both eventually were dismissed, but the department under Blanche filed new charges against Comey.
The pursuit is not limited to Trump enemies of the past.
For his 80th birthday this month, the president hosted a fight held by UFC — a company he invested in — on the White House lawn. The event was broadcast on a network owned by the son of one of the president’s major donors. The spectacle drew a rebuke from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a persistent critic and potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender.
“The White House was built to serve the American people. Tonight it was used to promote a company the President owns stock in, sell subscriptions, promote corporate sponsors, push Trump crypto, and enrich the President and his family,” Newsom wrote on X. “The founders warned us about kings enriching themselves from public office.”
Days later, Newsom disclosed that Trump’s Department of Justice was investigating him and his wife.
Riccardi writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Lindsay Whitehurst and Fatima Hussein contributed to this report.
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