During a recent visit to Durham Cathedral in the United Kingdom, I was impressed with its current museum exhibition entitled “Magna Carta and the North” which illustrates the important role played by the Northern Barons in its creation. The protective, softly lit cases exhibit three copies of the important document from 1216, 1225 and 1300. 

While these are 800 year old documents, they have a topical resonance due to the growing disrespect for our legal traditions based on the principles inherent to English Civil Law. The need for controls on the executive power of the ruler of the land, whether it be King John (1199 – 1216), Charles I (1625 – 1649) or Donald J. Trump (2016–2020, 2024–- ?) are critical to the functioning of liberal democracies worldwide.

This ground-breaking Magna Carta was created during a time of civil conflict in England between the Angevin monarchy, which operated on the principle of vis et voluntas, translated as “force and will,” as a justification for his arbitrary executive decisions (sound familiar?). The First Barons’ War (1215-1217) pitted King John against the barons of England, including those of Durham and Northumberland. The “Great Charter,” as it became known, was the foundation for subsequent laws which reduced the power of any ruling monarch. In time, assemblies, courts and parliaments would eventually hold the balance of power. 

The original New England colonies were created via Royal Charters, but when colonists rebelled against the arbitrary rule of King George III, the revolutionary founders cited the Magna Carta as a key document guaranteeing that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.”

It seems obvious to me that the current situation of the United States government has passed a threshold whereby the President is acting like a monarch, ruling by “the Divine Right of Kings.”  The checks and balances built into the U.S. Constitution have failed completely. U.S. President Donald Trump is ruling by executive order while creating an oligarchy patterned after Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. 

Executive orders are built into the Executive branch operation. Since World War II, the number of executive orders issued by U.S. presidents has dropped from an all-time peak of over 2,000—signed by FDR, mostly during WWII—down to Biden’s 162. 

By contrast, Donald J. Trump has signed 188 orders during his first six months in office, including 24 orders on January 20^th, 2025. He also rescinded all executive orders issued by predecessor President Joe Biden during his four-year term, an action never taken by a previous U.S. president. It seems that we are going to find out what President Trump means by “retribution” for his “enemies list” as it was called during the Nixon White House years.

The Magna Carta was forged as a peaceful resolution document during a civil war. I believe that the US is also on the knife’s edge of civil conflict, with the MAGA-hatted hordes and Bikers for Trump prepared to rumble with the liberal elements of U.S. society. Trump is currently using the US military to control the civilian population by creating military zones in major cities. That’s just step one. 

The curious fact is that when it comes to automatic weapons, there are more assault rifles in the hands of civilians than there are in the US military stockpile, according to Senator Bernie Sanders. Not a scenario which instills confidence in the political stability of the country. Being a close neighbour makes Canadians nervous, even without Trump’s threat to remake Canada as “the 51^st state.”

Back in 1985, Margaret Atwood published her futuristic dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale about a military dictatorship, the Republic of Gilead, which is involved in a civil war across the continent of North America (excluding Canada, a haven for refugees.) 

It was greeted warmly by critics and won the Governor General’s Award for fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. She saw something in the election of Ronald Reagan that the rest of us missed, as well as the treatment of Iranian women following the Islamic revolution in 1978-79.

In 2017, when Queen’s University graduate Omar El Akkad published his debut speculative fiction novel American War, the possibility of a civil conflict seemed remote despite Donald Trump’s recent election. The novel is set in 2074 when the U.S. bans fossil fuels leading to the assassination of the President and a second American Civil War. Considering that it was a debut novel, American War received a lot of attention and was shortlisted for the Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize.

Canadian novelist and journalist Stephen Marche released The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future in 2023—exactly one year after the January 6^th attack on the US Capitol. It was based in part on his November 2018 Walrus article entitled “America’s Next Civil War,” which provocatively stated, “Figuring out what will happen there means figuring out what we will eventually face here." 

Ian Bassin in a New York Time Book Review summarized this non-fiction work:

“The narrative delivers Cormac McCarthy-worthy drama; while the nonfictional asides imbue that drama with the authority of documentary.” 

Alex Garland, the UK screenwriter/director of Civil War (2024) made previous “dystopian” productions set not far into our future, including 28 Weeks Later (2002), Ex Machina (2014) and Annihilation (2018). Garland’s most recent effort is superior to all his previous work, and it’s a cautionary tale of what might happen to the United States if dictatorship defeats democracy.

While the script very accurately dramatizes the adrenaline-saturated life of front-line photojournalists in any war-torn country, what makes it unique is the premise that this could happen in an America “locked and loaded.” Civil War focuses on the Western Forces (California & Texas) overcoming the Loyalist states, under the control of a Washington dictator/President, who seems remarkably familiar.

As the Magna Carta may appear on the surface as some dusty document from our distant past, it has an important place as the foundation stone of our legal system and will continue in that role, given the respect that it deserves by those in power. Winston Churchill observed that [Magna Carta provided] "a system of checks and balances which would accord the monarchy its necessary strength but would prevent its perversion by a tyrant or a fool.”

I do not see any barons on the horizon willing to challenge the President and curtail his dictatorial impulses and lack of forethought in making rash decisions which have serious and long-term implications worldwide. Authors of non-fiction and fiction, as well as filmmakers, have provided warnings of this grave danger, it is up to the elected US politicians to step up and heed that warning.

To quote Peter Finch as TV broadcaster Howard Beale in Network (1976): “And woe is us! We are in a lot of trouble!!”