“No king in America,” said the hand-lettered signs at protests across the nation Saturday.

It was the 250th anniversary of the battles at Lexington and Concord that started the American Revolution, which rid our nation of despotic rule forever.

Or so we thought.

Our new tyrant plans to dominate next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776.

Unless America rediscovers its conscience, that occasion will leave us with a Congress as conspicuous for its cowardice as its forebears were for courage.

All 56 who signed the Declaration consciously risked their lives. Nine died of wounds or hardships before the Revolution was won.

Petrified of Trump

President Donald Trump’s partisans in Congress, protective of their plush offices and their $174,000 public paychecks, dare not even contradict him, let alone exercise their constitutional duty to fight him.

But for the courts, Trump’s despotism would be total. It may yet be if he persists in defying judges and Congress lets him.

Sweeping people off the streets, revoking their visas without hearings, jailing and even deporting them without due process is the behavior of a dictator.

Immigrants today, citizens tomorrow.

He has a compulsion to control everything.

On orders from his incompetent defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, the U.S. Naval Academy scanned its catalog for anything reflecting race, inequality or diversity and hastily swept 381 titles off its library shelves. Other service academies are expected to follow suit.

Terrorizing our schools

Trump’s regime threatens to withhold money and contracts from states and private universities that don’t purge the subjects from curricula and employment policies.

Books purged at Annapolis include memoirs by Black authors Maya Angelou and Stacey Abrams, an academic paper by a midshipman about police violence and race, a history of the Ku Klux Klan, and a novel, “Horse,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Geraldine Brooks.

“Horse” is a fictionalized account of how a Black slave trained the fabled race horse Lexington for a white man who owned them both. It ends with the killing of a Black art historian by a police officer who mistakes the victim’s cell phone for a gun.

“The secretary of defense,” Brooks wrote in an e-mail to the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, “is such a pulling coward that he fears the power of words. The brave, selfless young men and women of our military academies deserve much better leadership.”

Two copies of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” one of the most racist screeds in history, remain on the shelf in Annapolis. So does “The Bell Curve,” which suggested that Blacks are less intelligent on average than whites.

Trump stops at nothing. Antisemitism, his pretext for trying to dominate scores of universities and cancel student visas, is no excuse for a gross abuse of power. Jews and all other minorities should not trust such a profoundly racist regime.

America, unrecognizable

After only three months, the world hardly recognizes America anymore.

Trump has declared a tariff war upsetting the whole planet along with the economy and the savings and family budgets of Americans.

He’s going after the independence of the Federal Reserve. He’s ignoring, flouting or trying to undo laws protecting consumers, workers and the environment.

He has trashed scientific research and surrendered public health to crackpots. He’s abandoned the historic U.S. commitment to democracy abroad and is preparing to betray Ukraine to Russia.

He has demolished government defenses against evil foreign influences, such as Russian and Chinese disinformation.

Dismembering America

He’s weakening key federal agencies, notably the IRS and Social Security, with indiscriminate layoffs and malicious spending cuts. Women and children are dying in the Third World for losses of abruptly withdrawn U.S. aid. He’s floating a scheme to pull our embassies and consulates out of sub-Saharan Africa.

America is being dismembered by Trump’s ignorance, bigotries and venom, Elon Musk’s ego, and what Hillary Clinton called a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

The principal figures in that conspiracy — billionaires such as the Mellon and Koch families — crave a return to the era of the robber barons with no income tax, no social safety net and no restraints on exploiting the public, ravaging the environment and amassing obscene wealth.

Trump is their deliverance. He admits he wants to replace the income tax with tariffs.

It’s a power play, in the words of conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, “to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed.”

Brooks called for a “national comprehensive civic uprising” in opposition.

Ultimately, this is on all of us. To let an unshackled Trump go on betrays the sacrifices of every American patriot at Lexington and Concord in 1775.

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The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

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