Who's the ruthless mad king now?

Maybe the mad king, the other one, wasn’t so mad after all.

- Maureen Dowd

“George III is Abraham Lincoln compared to Trump,” said Rick Atkinson, who is vivifying the Revolutionary War in his mesmerising histories The British Are Coming and The Fate of the Day. The latter, the second book in a planned trilogy, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for six weeks and is being devoured by lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

As the “No Kings” resistance among Democrats bristles, and as President Donald Trump continues to defy limits on executive power, it is instructive to examine comparisons of Mr Trump to King George.

“George isn’t the ‘royal brute’ that Thomas Paine calls him in ‘Common Sense,” Atkinson said. “He’s not the ‘tyrant’ that Jefferson calls him in the Declaration of Independence, and he's not the sinister idiot who runs across the stage in ‘Hamilton’ every night singing ‘You'll Be Back.”

“And when push comes to shove, I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love!”

Yes, King George had manic episodes that scared people — depicted in Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III, a play made into a film with Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren. Palace aides are unnerved when the king’s urine turns blue.

“He was in a straitjacket for a while, that’s how deranged he was,” Atkinson said. “His last 10 years were spent at Windsor, basically in a cell. He went blind and deaf. He had long white hair, white beard.”