Monarchy rarely announces itself with a trumpet. It arrives by motorcade and procurement memo, wearing the vocabulary of “security” while moving like a prerogative. It does not begin with a crown. It begins with distance — and the assumption that the public exists to watch, not to judge.

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In a republic, transportation is logistics. In a royal court, transportation is theater. A vehicle conveys authority in one system; it performs hierarchy in the other. The point is not movement but elevation — the curated demonstration that some do not travel so much as descend.

It is here that the fracture line begins.

As I argued in No Kings Means Us, the people are not the beneficiaries of sovereignty — they are its source. Officials are not elevated above the public; they are bound by it. There is no jurisdiction of glamour in a republic, no presumption of station. Power is held on loan and answerable to its lender. Once a public servant begins to behave as though public office is a personal rank, the question is not “how lavish” but by what source of authority.

And this is why DHS secretary Kristi Noem’s travel decisions are not merely extravagant — they are self-anointing. The “justification” is security; the function is spectacle. Two Gulfstreams are not instruments of duty. They are regalia by invoice — the robes acquired before the coronation.

A republic recognizes the use of necessary equipment. A court recognizes tribute.

Noem’s signals predate the aircraft purchase. She is the same official who boasted of executing a dog to demonstrate “judgment.” But the boast was not about decisiveness — it was about dominion. The logic was proprietorship: I dispose; therefore, I rule. The practice is not cruelty as pathology; it is cruelty as credential, hierarchy proven in miniature.

One does not audition for stewardship this way — one auditions for favor.

And favor, in Trump’s ecosystem, is not granted for competence. It is extended to those deemed subservient — those who signal that their office is not constitutional but feudal, belonging not to the public but to the prince. His world does not have governors. It has retainers.

These jets are not travel assets — they are processional rights. They do not carry a secretary to the people; they carry her above them. What is being rehearsed is not transport, but altitude — the curated distance of a would-be sovereign waiting for someone to place the crown.

The court is already forming itself around Trump’s vacancy.

The Bloom: Investiture by Self-Regard

Let it be known that Her Ladyship, Custodian of Gulfstreams and Preemptive Holder of Station, now travels as one who will not stoop to mere roads. Let her perimeter be styled as reverence. Let altitude stand in for legitimacy. Let inconvenience to mortals testify to rank.

Let no itinerary be mistaken for service when it may instead be mistaken for ceremony.

If once ermine was sufficient proof of divine favor, let modern presumptive royalty adopt the convenience of taxpayer-funded wings. Let procession substitute for accountability and let the steward become spectacle — provided the spectators can be kept on the other side of the rope.

Rehearsal is, after all, the first sacrament of coronation.

 Act II — Revocation

Ceremony is not authority. Ornamentation is not a source of authority. Jet fuel is not jurisdiction.

There is no doctrine of elevation in the American charter — only delegation. And delegation does not confer station. It binds conduct. The moment you ask the simplest constitutional question — “Who empowered this?” — the pageant crumples under its own embroidery.

Not statute — statute governs use, not splendor.

Not necessity — necessity is a plea, not a grant.

Not office — office is a role, not a rank.

The answer is no one. No sovereign bestowed this aura; it was self-issued, like all counterfeit regalia. And once seen as artifice, it ceases to cloak anything at all.

The correction in a republic is not fury. It is a withdrawal. You do not denounce the court; you stop pretending a throne exists. Without deference, the performance cannot function. Without elevation, there is no court — only a commuter with delusions of altitude.

Too many have forgotten this constitutional fact: in a monarchy, subjects kneel. In a republic, officials answer.

The test is public presence. When the public shows up, the robe turns back into a coat. The motorcade becomes a vehicle again. And the would-be sovereign returns to their rightful proportion: not a ruler among citizens, but a petitioner before them.

Revocation is not rebellion. It is recognition.

The moment the citizens see clearly, the pageant fails by physics. Authority flows downward only in systems where the people are beneath it. In this one, authority travels upward, which means borrowed grandeur collapses the instant the lender looks up from the ground level and reclaims what was never theirs to wear.

The citizenry is home.

And pageantry alone cannot raise a monarch — not without someone else, somewhere else, to build the machinery that would make the illusion durable.

Someone is writing that machinery now.

A scribe-in-shadow.

~Dunneagin