If a New York Times report is to be believed, Donald Trump doesn’t want to do the hard work of actually being president. //

While the idea of a president with no power sounds crazy to American ears, it’s actually how a lot of advanced democracies work around the world. Many countries have a ceremonial figurehead — either an elected president or a hereditary monarch — who represents the nation at state dinners and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. And they also have a head of government, usually the prime minister, who makes all the important policy decisions.

In the United States, we’ve combined these roles into a single person, and it hasn’t been working very well. It’s made the presidency an impossibly demanding job, while giving our head of government a degree of prestige that makes it harder to hold him accountable for his policy mistakes.

So here’s a modest proposal: Let’s make Donald Trump king of the United States. This seems to be the job he actually wants. And replacing America’s powerful elected president with a powerless hereditary monarchy would improve the American political system. //

Should America have a weak president like Italy or a constitutional monarch like Great Britain? As Vox’s Dylan Matthews has argued, the key advantage of a constitutional monarch is that he or she has absolutely no democratic legitimacy. An elected president is always going to be tempted to meddle in politics, no matter how much the Constitution formally limits his role.

But there’s zero danger of a hereditary monarch like Queen Elizabeth doing this. She knows that the public is only going to support her continued reign if she remains strictly neutral in political fights. In short, it’s precisely a monarch’s lack of democratic legitimacy that makes monarchy a better model than a weak presidency.

If Trump merely became a figurehead president for four or eight years, there’s a danger that his successor would try to once again exercise real authority. Which is why the smarter play would be to make Trump’s vision of a powerless presidency permanent: Abolish the presidency and turn President Trump into King Donald.

King Donald would rule for life, but he’d have few of the powers of the current presidency. He wouldn’t have the power to veto legislation or appoint judges, ambassadors, or members of the Cabinet. He wouldn’t command the military or negotiate treaties. Congress might retain the power to impeach him, but with the king having a largely symbolic role there’d be no reason to use it.

In a lot of ways, Trump has been preparing to be America’s monarch all his life. His gold-encrusted Manhattan penthouse seems tacky now. But it — as well as with his winter palace in Palm Beach, Florida — are appropriate residences for America’s reigning monarch.

The role of a monarch is to preside over important occasions and accept the adoration of the public without doing any real work. No one’s personality is better suited to this role than Donald Trump’s.