Donald Trump is Actually Just a Dumb Henry VIII

In an election year, things can start to feel pretty familiar. We all know the drill. Non-political TV commercials will be come a thing of the past. The phone rings off the hook at dinner time. You assume a persistent state of anxiety.

This year promises to be more of the same. Really, this year promises to be much more of the same as the campaigning inevitably turns more and more negative. “But wait!” you say. “This election in unprecedented! We’ve never seen anyone the likes of Donald Trump before!”

And that’s just not true. See, because Donald Trump is really just a dumber, modern version of Henry VIII (King of England 1509-1547).

Donald Trump is just Henry VIII with Twitter (update: Henry VIII is on Twitter), kind of like how Avatar was really just Ferngully in 3D. And full disclosure: some of this stuff seems kind of petty. The thing is, petty personal stuff is fair game because of comparison #1.

Comparison #1 – Donald Trump and Henry VIII were both extremely petty. Historians generally use words like “reactionary,” “harsh,” and “insecure” to describe the later years of Henry’s reign. Does any of that sound familiar? The monarch was more or less continually at war with France, pretty much entirely as a result of personal beefs with Francis I. Also with Scotland. And Rome. And Spain.

Comparison #2 – Both guys got in a huge fight with the Pope (over some childish bullshit). Donald Trump managed to spat with basically the best Pope we’ve ever had because the guy described un-Christian foreign policy suggestions as un-Christian. Henry took it one step further. He decided he didn’t really want his wife anymore, and since divorce was pretty taboo in 1527 he decided to just quit Catholicism, which pretty much meant that everyone else had to quit Catholicism too.

Comparison #3 – So speaking of divorce, both guys got married. Like, a lot. Of course at press time Mr. Trump has been married three times. Henry managed to rack up six wives in his 55 year life, which is pretty impressive for a time when divorce was a no-no. How’d he do it, you ask? Two annulments, two natural deaths, and two executions. I wonder what The Donald would do without a good divorce attorney and gobs of money?

Comparison #4 – And it’s those gobs of money that bring us to comparison #4. Both guys were born loaded and then spent their adult lives blowing it on an indulgent lifestyle. Both men were born into a picture of privilege, and both men turned out to be pretty lousy businessmen. In Henry’s case this led to the ruination of a personal fortune and healthy English economy. Trump hasn’t been given the keys to the economy yet, but his record shows that he’s really an average businessman at best, and I suspect that he’s actually broke. In both cases a huge inheritance eventually fell victim to extravagance and lots and lots of gold (because gold is classy).

Comparison #5 – Both guys expressed interest in spending an insane amount of money defending the southern border (and Henry actually did it). In fairness, in Henry’s case it kind of made sense because he made a career of pissing off all of Continental Europe.

The comparisons keep going. Both men had a penchant for gambling. Both men advocated strongly for a paranoid insulation of the border. Both men were obsessed with shiny stuff.

But there’s one really striking difference: Henry VIII was pretty damn smart.

Henry was a renaissance man. He was an accomplished musician, a talented composer, and a poet. He was an avid reader and an author. He revolutionized military theory. He cherished knowledge and took pride in being a thinker. On the other hand, we’ve got this guy:

And that’s really the most compelling difference. The personality profiles are essentially identical. They’re both megalomaniacal sociopaths born into wealth and who take power for granted. They’re womanizing narcissists who’ve made their own petty disagreements matters of national security. They’re both men who were attractive and charming in their young lives, and who’s unrelenting vanity plummeted them into paranoid insecurity in their later years.

Of course another (important) difference is that Donald Trump isn’t actually in charge of anything yet. (Celebrity Apprentice doesn’t count). Henry VIII reigned for nearly four decades. A quick look at his record sheds a bit of light on what four years of Trump might look like.

Henry made dramatic changes to the English Constitution, primarily to greatly expand executive power. I recommend getting out today to exercise some of those constitutional rights while you’ve still got ’em. Hell, maybe four years of Trump turns into four decades.
Henry preferred a military-forward approach to diplomacy. For instance, to encourage James I of Scotland to marry his infant daughter to Henry’s son Edward, the English monarch went to a decade long war with Scotland; a truce sealed by matrimony was the only path to peace. I sure hope President Trump doesn’t decide he wants a new Canadian wife!
Henry quashed dissent with more executions than any other English Monarch. Trump has already exhibited a distaste for being questioned by blacklisting an unprecedented number of news agencies from his campaign events.
He ran the economy into the ground. Henry VIII inherited, in addition to a large personal fortune, a thriving English economy. It only took a few years of an extravagant lifestyle, hasty military conflicts, and the construction of elaborate royal palaces to burn through cash reserves and tank the economy. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. Don’t worry though, Henry did manage to pay for it all (through loans from Parliament and the seizure of church property).

And so all this talk about the Trump candidacy being unprecedented isn’t quite right. We’ve seen this guy before, albeit as a disgraced 16th century monarch who’s fallen on the wrong side of history. I wonder what Henry would have done with a nuke?