MONARCHY IS ONE OF the older and more ridiculous of human conceits. The more you think about it the weirder it gets. Elective or hereditary it's permanent; there's no such thing as rotating kingship, and the idea is that you do it unaccountably until you die, restricted only by God or the Mandate of Heaven. They are, like the current world's political situation is, totally ludicrous, but very, very serious.
There's thousands of years of commentary about what makes good and bad monarchs, it's a central concern of a lot of ancient literature from the Bible, right up to the early modern Machiavellian princely-manual period, which is, when you think about it, even weirder, because the whole point is that you can't get rid of them if they're shit. It's the ultimate sortition mechanism; when it's working properly no royal personage ever has any choice about being born, or their place in the chain of succession. To open that to question, as Edward VII did for example by abdicating to go and live on Divorced Nazi Beach Island, is to introduce doubt into the whole thing. New kings and dynastic founders are the most vulnerable, for ideological reasons. When societies started to become aware that the People could get rid of them and just not have any, a bunch of weird dudes went and invented the United States.
And so to Donald Trump, King. What's interesting to me is that this kind of shitposting, trolly, just-kidding-no-I'm-serious kingship is one of the endpoints of a society in which merit principles are supposed to, but obviously don't, operate at the level of sovereignty. Other people have commented that modern right-wing politics operates at a level of opposition almost to the concept of public virtue, and of elevating a free-for-all of personal interest as the goal. What I'll say is that monarchs as unequal partners in the law stand counter to the concept of human merit, as, throughout his whole, life, has Donald Trump himself.
We entered the 21st century fully in the liberal mode of the Fukuyama best-of-all-possible-worlds where virtue, worth, ability, justice, and merit, were measurably objective and desirable. Now we're doing celebrity kings. Again. Wild.