What would the founding fathers say? You can\u2019t write about American independence, especially this year, without fielding that question in every variation. To which political party would George Washington belong? What would Ben Franklin think of the tech bros? How would John Adams feel about failing to land a role in \u201cHamilton\u201d? What would Thomas Jefferson make of the National Museum of African American History and Culture? And, of course, how would any of the founders reckon with a president who accepts extravagant gifts from foreign powers, puts his face on a 24-karat gold coin and commemorates the 250th anniversary of American independence with a mixed martial arts event on the White House lawn?<\/p>\n
In a few cases we actually know the answers, because in the summer of 1776, Franklin, Jefferson and Adams signed the document we know as the Declaration of Independence. The Continental Congress had inflicted some 86 changes on Jefferson\u2019s draft, changes that landed like daggers to his heart. In the end, though, the members agreed to the text, affixing their names and pledging to the new nation their lives, fortunes and their \u201csacred honor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Only in the early 19th century did the document acquire its cult status, becoming our North Star, our creed and covenant. Nearly a half-century after he had written it, Jefferson explained \u201cit was intended to be an expression of the American mind.\u201d As it turns out, then as now, the American mind was exploding with grievances.<\/p>\n
Most of us can rattle off at least part of Jefferson\u2019s incandescent opening. But the next 650 or so words were the reason he composed the thing in the first place. They were the lines Congress worked over most obsessively. In the words of Samuel Adams, they represented a \u201ccatalogue of crimes of the deepest dye.\u201d They made the American case, in the most concrete terms, that King George III was guilty of every kind of abuse of power.<\/p>\n
In Jefferson\u2019s accounting, the king had undermined the rule of law, the common good, the judicial system and the political process. It seemed there was little he had not corrupted. By the time Jefferson had finished, he had, as the historian Richard Bell has put it, turned King George into \u201cNero, Richard III and Attila the Hun all rolled into one.\u201d<\/p>\n
For many who read the litany today<\/a>, the resonance is unmistakable. So if you really want to know what the founders would say, you might do worse than review a selection of our founding 27 grievances. The nonhallowed parts of the Declaration were the parts too incendiary for many 18th-century British newspapers, the libretto to Jefferson\u2019s familiar, soaring aria. In 2026 they also feel miserably familiar.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.\u201d<\/p>\n Jefferson opened with a broad claim, asserting, as had any number of colonial petitions, that the crown obstructed perfectly beneficial laws. What was shocking then is an almost daily occurrence now, as the current administration has endeavored to repeal science, mutilate history, cripple essential services, gut standards, corrupt the administration of justice, dismantle the oversight of government, undermine higher education, silence a free press, deprive the armed forces of effective leadership, thwart the political process and line its own pockets \u2014 all at once.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.\u201d<\/p>\n By dictating policy to its governors, the crown overrode the will of its constituents. That\u2019s classic executive overreach \u2014 and a favorite maneuver of Mr. Trump, who has tried to block California\u2019s climate regulations, ding Colorado\u2019s artificial intelligence regulations (too \u201cwoke\u201d) and withhold funding for the Gateway tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey. Mr. Trump deemed the tunnel \u201ca future boondoggle\u201d \u2014 a remarkable claim from a man who ordered a military parade on his own birthday.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.\u201d<\/p>\n Jefferson accused King George of trying to disenfranchise whole swaths of Americans. In February, Kristi Noem, who was then the homeland security secretary, announced that the Trump administration had \u201cbeen proactive to make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.\u201d Mr. Trump has insisted that Congress pass the SAVE America Act<\/a>, which could prevent millions of Americans from voting. This spring he signed an executive order that sought to limit mail-in voting.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.”<\/p>\n When the Massachusetts assembly seemed in danger of passing laws that irked the king, the royal governor forced the legislature into recess or removed it from its Boston location. If it could not meet, it could not vote. Last July, when the U.S. House was considering forcing the release of the Epstein files, its members were sent home early for the summer to avoid holding a vote that would irk Mr. Trump. It seemed like a foolproof idea at the time.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has endeavoured to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.\u201d<\/p>\n The colonists were eager to expand their ranks, which they understood to be essential to the American future. In 1773, however, they lost the right to naturalize immigrants, and the colonies erupted in fury. The Trump administration has issued a list of 75 countries from which applications for immigrant visas will not be processed, including Somalia, after Mr. Trump accused Somalians of \u201ccompletely taking over\u201d Minnesota. Only white South Africans need apply.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.\u201d<\/p>\n When the crown decided to pay colonial judges directly, planting the judiciary beyond the people\u2019s control, the news arrived \u201clike thunder in the ears,\u201d as Samuel Adams put it. Those charged with dispensing impartial justice became, Adams argued, pawns of the king. Is this different from Mr. Trump\u2019s attempts to curb \u201crogue\u201d judges? Or the denunciation of judges who do not rule in his favor as \u201ccorrupt\u201d and \u201cderanged,\u201d or the dismissal of immigration judges who fail to deport people fast enough?<\/p>\n \u201cHe has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.\u201d<\/p>\n At the front of Jefferson\u2019s mind were the customs agents the crown dispatched to collect revenue that the colonists considered extortionate. They find their modern equivalents in the I.R.S. agents whom Mr. Trump has reportedly planned<\/a> to weaponize against political opponents \u2014 or in DOGE, which terrorized government employees whose sole offense was doing their job.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislatures.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor quartering large bodies of troops among us.\u201d<\/p>\n A decade before the Declaration, Franklin warned Parliament against dispatching troops to peaceful North America. \u201cThey will not find a rebellion,\u201d he predicted. \u201cThey may indeed make one.\u201d Four years later civilians and troops faced off in central Boston, on the evening we remember as the Boston Massacre. Minneapolis this winter returned it vividly to mind. Boston residents appreciated the troops housed in their public buildings about as much as the citizens of Minneapolis took to their occupiers, who were equipped with a selection of gear for close-quarters killing.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor protecting them, by a mock trial from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states.\u201d<\/p>\n Even mock trials would deliver more accountability than we\u2019ve seen for the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, specifically told ICE agents that they had federal immunity and that neither city nor state officials could interfere with their duties. Judge Patrick J. Schiltz of U.S. District Court in Minnesota reproached the agency for defying nearly 100 court orders in one month alone \u2014 more, he said, than \u201csome federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor imposing taxes on us without our consent.\u201d<\/p>\n The colonists protested taxation without representation. Mr. Trump goes further: taxation without any hint of logic. He has imposed tariffs as high as 145 percent and then proceeded to change them \u2014 by one tally<\/a>, more than 60 times, before the Supreme Court declared the entire effort to be unconstitutional. Mr. Trump justified his tariffs any number of ways, though he has also invoked them to prosecute grudges, as Canada discovered when the president took offense at a political ad, and as our European allies discovered when they objected to his aggressive interest in purchasing Greenland. \u201cTo me,\u201d Mr. Trump has said, \u201cthe most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.\u201d<\/p>\n No colonist was ever actually deported for trial abroad. London did, however, search for the legal means by which to do remove various opposition leaders. In the end no legal justification was found and no action was taken. The rule of law prevailed. The Trump administration has outdone King George, detaining and deporting American residents to countries where many of them had never before set foot. Mr. Trump has said he\u2019s considering doing the same for some U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.\u201d<\/p>\n The central question of the 1770s was this: If the colonists were treated like enemy aliens, cast from the king\u2019s protection, did they owe him allegiance? Here we are again: The Trump administration has said that it is rescinding<\/a> $1.5 billion in health and transportation funds from blue states. It has sought to block their FEMA relief. It has canceled more than $7 billion for clean energy projects \u2014 decisions that, according to a ruling by Judge Amit Mehta<\/a> of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the administration openly admitted it had made \u201cbased on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump in 2024.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.\u201d<\/p>\n Enough said.<\/p>\n \u201cHe is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation.\u201d<\/p>\n With this grievance, Jefferson was clearly turning up the heat. So is the Department of Homeland Security, which recently reported that it hired more than 12,000 officers and agents in four months. The department has done so using extremist language, with slogans seemingly borrowed from white nationalist groups. Who needs foreign mercenaries when you have a heavily armed, lightly trained domestic force?<\/p>\n The Declaration cannot be said to be having a happy semiquincentennial. Very little about the document feels remotely self-evident today. Certainly it has come in for a beating before and managed to recover: In 1857, Abraham Lincoln declared it had been \u201cassailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.\u201d That was at another inglorious moment, in the wake of the Dred Scott decision, which flew directly in the face of a proclamation that was, as Lincoln observed, \u201cheld sacred by all.\u201d<\/p>\n The sacred principles are very well and good. But is it possible that in this document that defines us, that has made us who we want to believe we are \u2014 a subject on which we seem universally even to agree \u2014 we\u2019ve been memorizing the wrong part all along? The libretto may matter as much as that indelible aria.<\/p>\n At the end of his inventory of abuses and usurpations, Jefferson slips in a zinger: \u201cA prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Schiff, the author of \u201cThe Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,\u201d is at work on a book about Benjamin Franklin.<\/p>\n Source photographs by Saul Loeb, Jim Watson, Samuel Corum\/Stringer via Getty Images.<\/p>\n The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters<\/a> to the editor. We\u2019d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips<\/a>. And here\u2019s our email: letters@nytimes.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook<\/a>, Instagram<\/a>, TikTok<\/a>, Bluesky<\/a>, WhatsApp<\/a> and Threads<\/a>.<\/p>\n