The most heavily armed nation on earth is at war, and its supreme commander has lately been obsessed with a tally. According to The Washington Post, the president of the United States has spent the past few months between one war decision and the next counting the trees in Lafayette Square, the park he considers the entrance to the White House. He has decreed there must be exactly 47, the tribute of the 47th president to himself, and that they must be exclusively maples, his favorite.

This preference carries its own peculiar logic. The maple leaf adorns the flag of Canada, a country he frequently and unprompted proposes annexing as the 51st state. The emblem has already claimed the federal lawn; the rest of the territory is just a matter of time. The taste for planting came only after the taste for felling. Constructing the $300 million ballroom had already doomed the magnolias planted for Harding and Roosevelt and leveled the garden of Jacqueline Kennedy, a plot that had survived a century of tenants.

Louis XIV made war through nearly his entire reign and, in the intervals, perfected Versailles. He had fully grown trees uprooted from the provinces and planted before the palace; they died by the thousands and were replaced before dawn, ensuring the king never opened his shutters to a failure. The fountains lacked the water pressure to run simultaneously, so gardeners opened them just ahead of his stroll and shut them behind his back. In the world of the king, the water never stopped. There, the court mastered its primary trade, which was adjusting reality to the desire of the sovereign. Three centuries later, this same pageantry has consumed a republic.

The definitive portrait of that republic has just been published. Regime Change, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, arrived in June with a cover bound in gold, a rare instance of honest packaging. The phrase in its subtitle, “imperial presidency”, was coined in 1973 by Arthur Schlesinger as a fire alarm during the twilight of Nixon; the authors redeploy it as a job description. A republic has been........

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