There’s a certain poetry to watching a man confuse his own delusion for destiny. Donald J. Trump, reality television’s answer to a Greek tragedy, seems to believe he’s Daenerys Targaryen: the wronged ruler, exiled from his throne, fated to return on the backs of dragons—or in his case, a fleet of golf carts wrapped in gold vinyl. He imagines himself breaking chains, commanding armies, inspiring loyalty through charisma and fear. But in the grim adaptation that is American politics, Trump isn’t Daenerys. He’s Robert Baratheon—bloated by power, nostalgic for past glory, and one poisoned chalice away from poetic justice.
It’s almost tender, really, this belief that he’s the dragon reborn. Daenerys was complex, haunted, and eventually consumed by her own righteousness. Trump, on the other hand, is a simpler creature. He’s not tormented by morality or the burden of choice. He’s tormented by the lighting in courtrooms and whether the camera adds ten pounds of indictment.
Robert Baratheon, for all his faults, had once been a warrior. He’d swung a hammer and taken a crown by force. Trump’s only hammer is rhetorical, and even that he swings like a toddler with vertigo. Baratheon’s problem was that the fight was all he knew; ruling bored him. Trump’s problem is the same—but without the dignity of a backstory involving actual war. His battlefield is the comments section, his sword a caps-lock key.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that HBO’s writers decided to merge Westeros with modern politics. The camera pans across Mar-a-Lago, reimagined as the Red Keep if the Red Keep had been foreclosed and reborn as a golf resort for oligarchs and ghosts of failed real estate projects.
The king is older now, surrounded by sycophants and sell-swords who whisper “Yes, Your Grace” while secretly drafting exit strategies. His Small Council is a rogues’ gallery of disgraced courtiers—Hegseth the Loud, Vance the Simpering, Rubio the Small. And somewhere, in the shadows, Melania—his own Melisandre—sits in quiet calculation, wondering when the moment will come to let the poison slip into the wine.
For years, she’s smiled dutifully beside him, her mind elsewhere, perhaps in a parallel universe where she’s free from having to hold the hand that once signed checks to Stormy Daniels. When history writes the footnote, it won’t be about whether she poisoned him—it’ll be about how long she had to pretend she might.
And oh, what a death scene it would be. Not a noble one. Not the blaze of dragonfire or the cry of battle. No, Trump’s demise will be characteristically banal, broadcast live, adorned with hashtags. He’ll think himself betrayed by the deep state, by the press, by the gods of fairness. But it will come, inevitably, from within—from one of the very courtiers who built their careers groveling before him.
If the fates have a sense of humor, it’ll be JD Vance—Trump’s adopted heir, his pet scribe turned Judas. Vance, the man who once called Trump “America’s Hitler” before realizing that Hitler’s base had great turnout numbers. Trump sees in him a mirror of loyalty, but Vance’s eyes gleam with the ambition of a man who has already practiced his eulogy. When the crown slips, he’ll be the first to claim it wasn’t meant for the old king anyway.
And if not Vance, perhaps Little Baby Boy Marco Rubio—ever the court eunuch of ambition, forever testing the political winds with a damp finger. Rubio is the kind of man who smiles while sharpening knives, who praises the throne even as he measures its height. Trump thinks he’s beneath him, but all tyrants forget that betrayal, like gravity, pulls upward when the time is right.
Trump’s tragedy is not that he’s fallen from grace—it’s that he never understood what grace was. Robert Baratheon was undone by excess, yes, but he had known love once, friendship once, honor once. Trump’s entire mythology is transactional. Every ally is a servant until they aren’t. Every victory is borrowed, every loyalty rented. He is a king who rules by spectacle, mistaking attention for authority.
He would have been a brilliant medieval monarch if Twitter had existed in the Seven Kingdoms. Imagine the royal decrees:
“Sad to see traitor Ned Stark crying about honor! Many say his head wasn’t even that great!”
“Daenerys Targaryen—low energy, bad ratings. Dragons overrated. I have the BEST fire. Ask anyone!”
“The Night King was treated very unfairly. Witch hunt!”
The man would have live-streamed his own rebellion, then denied it ever happened.
But what truly cements Trump’s kinship with Robert Baratheon isn’t the corruption or the excess. It’s the tragic boredom that comes after power. Both men spent their lives chasing something they couldn’t keep once they caught it. For Robert, it was Lyanna. For Trump, it was relevance.
Baratheon had his hunting parties and his wine. Trump has his rallies, the modern equivalent of a king who must hear his subjects cheer to believe he still rules. Each “Lock her up!” is another swig of the vintage that keeps him upright. Each crowd, another reminder that he can still command noise, even if he’s lost command of everything else.
But just like Robert, Trump is surrounded by men who will not warn him when the boar charges. They’ll nod. They’ll flatter. They’ll watch. And when he falls, they’ll rush to claim they saw it coming all along.
The saddest irony is how much Trump genuinely believes in the epic version of his own story. He sees himself not as a man undone by gluttony, but as a misunderstood hero betrayed by lesser mortals. He imagines dragons roaring in applause, when in reality, it’s just the echo of his own applause track replayed at Mar-a-Lago.
The Targaryens ruled by blood and fire. Trump rules by merch and grievance. Theirs was a dynasty. His is a brand.
And yet, he clings to the fantasy. Maybe he sees Melania as his icy queen—aloof, beautiful, and disinterested. Maybe he thinks JD Vance is his Tyrion—clever, loyal, indispensable. (He’s not. He’s more like Lancel Lannister with a podcast.) Maybe he thinks his indictments are dragons chained beneath the castle, ready to rise and vindicate him.
But the real picture looks more like this: the court has grown restless. The kingdom has grown tired. And the king still believes his reflection is a prophecy.
Robert Baratheon’s death was, in its way, merciful. A quick poisoning, a tragic hunt, a moment of clarity before the end. Trump’s undoing will be slower, more humiliating, dragged across months of trial coverage and endless punditry. He’ll rage, of course. He’ll call it unfair. He’ll say “people are saying” it’s all rigged. But even he knows that the real poison was pride—the belief that he could rewrite the laws of power with personality alone.
And so, the final act will not be noble. It will be petty, televised, and narrated by men who once called him a genius. His courtiers will turn memoirists. His generals will “find Jesus.” His allies will discover ethics just in time for book tours. The last loyalty to fall will be Melania’s silence, and when that cracks, it’ll be louder than any dragon.
Closing Section: The Boar Always Wins
History loves symmetry. Robert Baratheon was killed by a boar—a symbol of gluttony, recklessness, and the hunt gone wrong. If fate has a sense of humor, Trump’s metaphorical boar is already sniffing through the underbrush of his own creation. It could be JD Vance, the apprentice who learned betrayal at the master’s knee. It could be Marco Rubio, the minor prince with just enough cowardice to survive him. Or it could be something smaller still—an indictment, a heartbeat, a truth he can’t brand out of existence.
Melania, of course, will say nothing. She doesn’t need to. History will do it for her.
And so the saga will end not with fire, but with a wheeze. Not a queen atop a dragon, but a tired man yelling at ghosts. The Iron Throne was never built for men of impulse; it was built for those who understand its cost. Trump never wanted the weight—just the shine.
But the crown, once worn, doesn’t forgive. It presses down until it finds the softest spot.
And as the kingdom of MAGA begins to eat itself—each acolyte a would-be heir, each senator a scheming bannerman—the boar will charge, the cup will spill, and the realm will move on, as realms always do.
No kings, indeed.