No Kings
On currency, golden calves, and what happens when people believe they are the good guys
Two quotes have been on my mind lately…
The first is from Upton Sinclair:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The second was written 350 years ago. Blaise Pascal, in his 1670 Pensées:
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
Three and a half centuries, but just as relevant day.
The Announcement
Yesterday, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that Donald Trump’s signature will appear on American paper currency beginning in June, starting with the $100 bill.
Historically, paper currency carries the signatures of the treasury secretary and the treasurer. The redesigned notes will also, for the first time in 165 years, drop the signature of the U.S. treasurer, an unbroken tradition since the government first issued paper currency in 1861.
The Treasury framed it as an honor tied to the nation’s 250th anniversary. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said there is “no more powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country and President Donald J. Trump than U.S. dollar bills bearing his name.”
Take a moment with that sentence.
This did not come from nowhere.
Trump’s name has been installed on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the United States Institute of Peace. His picture appears on some National Park annual visitor passes. His administration has launched TrumpRx, a prescription drug website, and the Trump Gold Card. His name is being proposed for warships. There are people who have built golden statues of him.
And now his signature will be on the money in your wallet.
None of this is normal.
Ask yourself: if Barack Obama had put his name on the Kennedy Center, his image on park passes, and his signature on the currency, would the people cheering this right now have cheered that?
You already know the answer. They would have called it tyranny. Rightly so.
What Kings Do
There is a pattern that repeats through history, and it is not subtle. It is the tradition of false titles…
Vladimir Putin is President.
Kim Jong Un is Supreme Leader.
Xi Jinping is President.
The titles are theater. They are all monarchs. No different than emperors in ages past.
And one of the things that every king, every emperor, every strongman does, without exception, is put his name and face on everything. On the buildings. On the currency. On the institutions. On the national identity itself.
The message is always the same:
I am the country. The country is me.
It doesn’t matter what the legal structure says.
The Pattern That Never Ends Well
Every populist, every fascist, every authoritarian in history has had enthusiastic supporters cheering them on.
These were not stupid people. Many educated, successful people have fallen under the spell of an authoritarian. They need those people behind them.
They were convinced, deeply and sincerely, that they were ushering in a golden age. They believed they were fighting evil. They believed the ends justified the means.
And here is where Sinclair’s observation cuts like a blade:
Many of Trump’s most devoted supporters have been promised a tax-free age of prosperity, a golden era they will be “tired of winning.” They have a financial and psychological stake in believing that.
The promise requires not seeing what the actions reveal. That the wealth is flowing upward, to the donor class, and most of all to the man making the promises.
When your hope depends on not seeing the truth, you will not see it.
You will be well supplied with reasons why you don’t need to.
What did all those promised golden ages lead to historically?
War.
Genocide.
Economic and social collapse.
Nothing good.
Not once. Not ever.
How We Got Here
To understand how we arrived at this moment, you have to understand what has been done to people’s minds over the last thirty years.
Both sides of the political divide have been systematically conditioned to see the other as evil.
Not misguided. Not wrong on policy.
Evil.
Destroyers of the country. Existential threats to everything decent.
The average Fox News viewer watches hours a day. Viewers of Newsmax and OAN are exposed to even more extreme content.
These are not news organizations in any meaningful sense. They are outrage-inducing dopamine activation systems. They exist to keep you angry, keep you afraid, and keep you certain that you are on the side of the angels and the other side is the devil.
At some point, it stops being a choice and becomes sculpted gray matter.
You almost can’t blame people for where they are.
They were taken there, step by step, over years.
But they were taken there cheerfully.
And that’s Pascal’s point.
Written 350 years ago and still waiting to be learned.
A Word to the Christians
The Bible warns about false prophets.
It warns clearly and more than once.
There is a story in Exodus about a golden calf. About a people who, while waiting for Moses to return from the mountain, built an idol and called it their god.
The story is not about stupid people.
It is about frightened people who wanted something they could see and touch to put their faith in, and who called what they built holy.
People are now literally building golden statues of Donald Trump.
The words of Jesus, on humility, on caring for the poor and the stranger, on loving your enemies, on the dangers of wealth and pride, are being set aside in favor of a deeply broken man being treated as a saint.
This is not metaphor.
This is the text made literal.
Pascal was himself a deeply religious man when he wrote those words. He wasn’t attacking faith. He was warning about what happens when certainty of righteousness removes every moral brake.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully, he observed, as when they are convinced God is on their side.
Three hundred and fifty years later, here we are.
The Protest and the Fury
Tomorrow, people across this country are participating in the No Kings protest.
Many of the people who are furious about it, calling it ridiculous, overblown, performative, are the same people who minimized January 6th. Who called it a tourist visit. Who looked at footage of police being beaten and a legislature being overrun and found reasons why it wasn’t that serious.
Their anger at No Kings is not really about No Kings.
It is about what No Kings implies.
It says: what you supported was wrong. Your worldview has consequences. You were on the wrong side of something important.
People will protect their certainty more fiercely than they will protect the truth.
The Sinclair observation again: it is very hard to understand what your identity depends on not understanding.
But the freedom to protest, to stand in a public space and say this is not right, this is not who we are, is not radical.
It is not extreme.
It is not un-American.
It is the thing America was built on.
The No Kings protest is tomorrow, March 28th.
Tonight I’m going to Dallas to see Jesse Welles, who wrote a song about all of this. It feels like exactly the right way to spend the night before. Please give the video below a watch on YouTube and really listen to Jesse’s words. They mean something for America. I think our founders would agree.