Kings Must Murder Still

 In Trump's tirade yesterday—in which he laced into an ABC journalist for daring to question Trump's royal guest about his complicity in the 2018 murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi—one word particularly stood out to me: "insubordinate." That's what Trump called the woman who asked the question (among many other cruel things): "insubordinate." 

Insubordinate? To whom? Who exactly does she supposedly work for here? Trump? Or the crown prince of Saudi Arabia? 

Here as so often, Trump displays that he has far more affinity for the principles of monarchy than for democracy. He seems to embrace a principle of lèse majesté, according to which mere subjects like us are not to be permitted to ask uncomfortable questions of potentates and princes. To do so is apparently to forget our place. 

This rule would seem to apply even when the princes in question are most likely murderers; but of course—there's no reason that should bother Trump. Just as he is a would-be king, much like the crown prince; so is he also a serial murderer in his own right. 

The crown prince cut up the body of a journalist with a bone saw; Trump has bombed to death more than 80 people in the Caribbean and the Pacific without any legal or military justification. The chewed up remains of some of his victims apparently washed ashore recently in Trinidad. 

Both he and the crown prince are being haunted by the remains of their handiwork. 

The AP reminds us this morning that today, November 19, is the anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg address. And I think back to what Vachel Lindsay once wrote of Abraham Lincoln—imagining if he could return from the grave, what he would say of the modern world. "It breaks his heart that kings must murder still," Lindsay wrote. 

And here we are, in 2025. And the kings are still murdering. 

But do they mind? Do they feel shamed by it? Trump did not seem troubled much by the accusations against the Saudi crown prince yesterday. "Things happen," he said—of the allegation (supported by U.S. intelligence assessments) that MBS ordered Khashoggi's killing. 

For good measure, Trump also insulted the victim: "A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about," he said. So I guess he deserved to be hacked up with a bone saw? 

No, it does not appear that Trump is troubled over-much by the possibility that his royal friend is a murderer. And why should he or any other would-be king care about such things? 

As Mark Twain put in, in his King Leopold's Soliloquy—speaking in the voice of the Belgian monarch who was responsible for so many atrocities in the Congo: 

"Persons will begin to ask again, as now and then in times past, how I can hope to win and keep the respect of the human race if I continue to give up my life to murder and pillage. [Scornfully] When have they heard me say I wanted the respect of the human race? Do they confuse me with the common herd? do they forget that I am a king? What king has valued the respect of the human race? I mean deep down in his private heart. If they would reflect, they would know that it is impossible that a king should value the respect of the human race. He stands upon an eminence and looks out over the world and sees multitudes of meek human things worshiping the persons, and submitting to the oppressions and exactions, of a dozen human things who are in no way better or finer than themselves—made on just their own pattern, in fact, and out of the same quality of mud. When it talks, it is a race of whales; but a king knows it for a race of tadpoles. Its history gives it away. If men were really men, how could a Czar be possible? and how could I be possible? But we are possible; we are quite safe; [...] It will be found that the race will put up with us, in its docile immemorial way. It may pull a wry face now and then, and make large talk, but it will stay on its knees all the same.

 Our country was founded by overthrowing a king. Yet here we are, centuries later—bending the knee to a would-be king; and being told we are "insubordinate" if we fail to flatter royal visitors—no matter how many murders they have committed. I guess "such divinity doth hedge a king," as Shakespeare put it. 

"Why, certainly—that is my protection," as Twain's King Leopold concludes. "I know the human race."