George III, king of Great Britain and its colonies at the time of the American Revolution, has been maligned unfairly.
During both the first and now the second term of President Donald Trump, commentators in the U.S. have invoked the king’s misdeeds to criticize Trump. When the president bypassed Congress to create a new government agency, appointed its head and stopped payment of millions of dollars of allocated federal funds, his critics noted that he assumed the role of Congress, a power grab that supposedly made him similar to George III. According to this criticism, the president engaged in tyranny, just as the founders accused George of doing.
