15 June—In a typically Trumpish (as opposed to Trumpian, which may imply more dignity than is warranted in anything involving Donald Trump) display of vainglorious arrogance, the tarps still cover the Kennedy Center portico palimpsest following the court-ordered removal of “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND.” Nor has the staging been taken down. It’s Trump’s way of giving the bird to the courts and the public, reminding us that he never admits defeat. And, while his flunkies haven’t yet appealed to SCOTUS, he may well be waiting for what he hopes are his SCOTUS pals to order the restoration of the inappropriate line in a shadow-docket ruling.

And while we’re vilifying the scumbag-in-thief (i.e., giving him his due), wasn’t it typically Trumpish for him to obtrude his contemptible name before the late John F. Kennedy’s? Trump’s flunkies would doubtless—and correctly—claim that it was less complicated and costly than rearranging “THE JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS.” But, as with inappropriateness, when has cost ever bothered Trump and his flunkies? And now that the staging and tarps have served their stated purpose, will the courts order their removal?

Leaving Trump to fester, then, today is the 811^th anniversary of the Magna Carta Libertatum, the Great Charter of Freedoms, commonly called Magna Carta without the definite article and the Freedoms limitation because Latin has no definite articles and the freedoms are questionable. So here’s the Monitor’s annual updated Magna Carta birthday disquisition

Magna Carta was drafted by Cardinal Stephen Langton, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury in 1215 (because there were no Protestants at the time) as a strategy to preempt a revolt and make peace between autocratic albeit weak and unpopular King John and a group of 40 refractory barons who were really no better. No surprise that John didn’t willingly accept the terms of what’s regarded as Europe’s first written constitution.

Of course, Magna Carta was written in Latin. English nobles tended to be somewhat better educated and less illiterate—but not necessarily more intelligent—than most commoners (i.e., peasants) in the thirteenth century. In fact, it’s likely that inbred nobles suffered from pronounced intellectual disability and diminished cognitive ability. And that’s the case to this day.

Mediaeval English nobles and royals spoke French but not necessarily Latin or English, while commoners (i.e., peasants) spoke English but probably not Latin or French. That’s the way the church and government officials liked it. So it’s doubtful that all the barons were actually able to read and/or understand what they were signing and forcing on the king.

That’s like present-day legislators voting on—usually in favor of—bills without understanding or even bothering to read them. Especially long bills like budget implementers in the Connecticut General Assembly and the asinine Big Beautiful Bill Act in the U.S. Congress, cornucopias of all sorts of unpleasant, unpalatable surprises. And let’s not forget Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s injunction to the U.S. House Democrat majority in 2010 to “pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Plus ça change . . .

Simply put, then, among the thousands of words detailing feudal and legal stuff (to use the generic historical term) Magna Carta stated that the king had to obey the law (like everybody else except dictators, including American presidents, according to the Supreme Court) and that even most common people (i.e., peasants) had certain—albeit limited—rights. Plus ça change . . .

Magna Carta promised to protect the church’s rights (a sine qua non in the old days, carried through to the U.S. Constitution, thanks to which those rights are still abused), protected the nobles (the only people who really mattered) from illegal imprisonment, and provided for access to relatively swift justice. It also guaranteed other silly populist nonsense like no taxation without representation.

Magna Carta stated but didn’t guarantee that there could be no punishment without lawful trial and conviction and protected the rights of women and children who inherited property. It also gave the lords the right to declare war on the king if he didn’t abide by the terms of the contract. That provision was supposed to be implemented through a council of 25 barons in what was essentially a non-legislative form of impeachment.

No surprise that neither King John nor the barons stood by their signed and sealed contractual commitments. Politics as usual. And, frankly, constitutions and laws in general still tend to be honored as much in their breach as in their observance. Plus ça change . . .

Not quite as stupid or weak as he may have been characterized in popular literature, King John was able, a couple of months after the signing at Runnymede, to bribe Pope Innocent III, the capo di tutti capi in Rome, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s boss at the time, to annul Magna Carta—on the perfectly legitimate ground that John had signed and sealed it only under duress. Predictably, that led to the First Barons’ War. And Magna Carta was amended and reissued in 1216. And 1217. And 1225.

Both King John and Pope Innocent III died in 1216. In 1225, 17-year-old King Henry III signed and sealed a Magna Carta reissue that differed from the original version in that, inter alia, it was no longer seen as having been executed under duress, but was freely granted in exchange for taxation (of course) and dropped the clause that allowed barons to enforce it even by seizing royal property. Of course.

The 1225 Magna Carta was considerably shorter than the 1215 original—37 chapters to 63—and became the one that eventually influenced constitutional law. One of the two copies of Magna Carta in the United States is a 1297 reissue bought by David Rubenstein at auction in 2007 and loaned to the National Archives in D.C., where it’s on public display. The other copy, a 1300 reissue, was discovered in 2023 in the Harvard Law School Library, where it’s not on public display.

If David Rubenstein rings a bell, he’s the cultured billionaire philanthropist who was fired by Donald Trump from his position as chairman of the Kennedy Center to be replaced by Trump’s favorite philistine ignoramus, himself.

Back to Magna Carta, even though it may have been an inspiration for the U.S. Constitution (through the Mayflower Compact and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which fraudulently calls itself the Constitution State), Magna Carta’s significance and influence tend to be overstated by historians and commentators.

More to the point, contrary to the etymology presented in Mel Brooks’s historic epic movie “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” King John, terrible monarch and despicable person though he may well have been, did not—repeat, did not—give his name to toilets. Don’t laugh. Okay, laugh. But it was over two decades ago that a presumably serious website about history and language actually presented that specious etymology as a fact. If it’s on the internet, it has to be true even though it often isn’t. In all events, that website got flushed down the john long ago.

And that’s precisely where Donald Trump belongs . . .