Historians alarmed as Trump seeks to rewrite US story for 250th anniversary

The problem for Trump, argued Johann Neem, a professor of US history at Western Washington University, is that the revolution was a rebellion “against tyranny and arbitrary power” of the type that he is now trying to wield.

“Any continuity between the actual political meaning of the revolution and what Trump is doing to our constitution is false,” he said. “Anybody who teaches about the American revolution knows that the thing the founders feared the most is someone like Donald Trump – someone who would be lawless and and have arbitrary power, that’s not limited by the rule of law.”