The lyin’ king Trump is the kind of leader Washington feared and reviled

July 5, 2026 — 3:30pm

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I found myself gazing at George Washington’s teeth the other day.

They weren’t wooden, as lore has it. On a trip to Mount Vernon in Virginia, which I had somehow never visited as an adult, even though my hometown is named after him, I learned that his spring-loaded dentures were fashioned from human, horse and cow teeth. Washington was always nervous that his teeth would fly out of his mouth. Those chompers kept him in constant pain. But the Father of the Country was uncomplaining, unlike the Crybaby of the Country we have now.

“I just can’t imagine two human beings who are more dissimilar than George Washington and Donald Trump,” Ron Chernow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of our first president, told me, on the occasion of the 250th birthday party for America that Trump has hijacked.

“Washington was discreet, reserved, courteous — he avoided any kind of show or ostentation or self-promotion,” Chernow said. “With Donald Trump, it’s nonstop bragging and boasting and self-promotion that would have been, I think, completely alien to George Washington, and very much counter to his idea of the way that a public servant should behave.”

It’s illuminating to look back at the life of the man who refused to be king now that we have a man who fancies himself a king.

On Monday, signing a presidential memorandum, Trump said, “We rule by common sense, to a large extent.”

The word is “govern,” Mr President, not “rule”.

Talking about the cauldron of heat this weekend, Trump boasted about his Independence Day speech on the Mall: “I’m going to make a really long speech, just to show that I can do anything.”

The hero who commanded the Continental Army was protective of the nascent democracy, realising its fragility. Cadet Bone Spurs maliciously erodes it, seeing it as a hindrance to his lust for........

© Brisbane Times