That's the premise of Guards! Guards! Terry Pratchett's clever and hilarious fantasy thriller, a parody of the police procedural, the hard-boiled crime novel, The Return of the King, and a meditation on authority, politics, and civil society. If it also seems uncomfortably apt to the idiocy and disruption of the disastrous second Trump administration, it's a testament to Pratchett's insight and humanism, tempered by distinctly modern skepticism.
In Guards! Guards!, an ambitious technocrat sets out to overturn the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, and even he is boggled by the small-mindedness and selective reasoning of the secret society that collectively summons the dragon. Pratchett's startlingly accurate satire shows that these are not evil men, on the whole, only individuals whose petty resentments and willingness to swallow absurd lies as long as they prop up their own sense of privilege are practically self-sustaining.
It was amazing, this mystic business. You tell them a lie, and then when you don't need it any more you tell them another lie and tell them they're progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they'll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable. Amazing.
But the dragon doesn't consider violence and greed to be means to a political ends: it is destruction and greed embodied, and the results, as they are with Trumpism, are predictable. The city burns, but the disruption is merely the pretext for a more authoritarian regime to claim primacy.
The resolution is less of an analogy to the current moment, mainly because Pratchett is a writer of comedy, but the healthy cynicism towards the matter of human nature still stands. The scruffy, neglected officers of the Night Watch are not exactly heroes but they are decent and try to do the right thing in their way, and they understand (mostly) that there is no absolute justice, only the endless flexibility and compromise required to navigate the competing interests and diversity of the emergent metropolis.
In this sense, there's no scope for the return of the king, given that kings are at worst brutal despots and at best practiced wielders of violence and rough justice. The unacknowledged king becomes a literal man of the people, a city cop, the watch officer, who enforces the imperfect rules of civil society and tolerance. And through this reflects back on and parodies the familiar fantasy trope (and Tolkien), it's not actually that far from Tolkien's own thoughts on kingship. Compassion, justice, healing, and restraint are the marks of the true king, not political power for it's own sake. Aragorn is the exception and the ideal who earns his kingdom through decades of unseen toil – few kings, in Tolkien or the Discworld, reach the ideal.
On the other hand, because he's a typically compelling Pratchett character, Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, might seem an almost idealized projection of another ideal, the benign despot. Yet in this case, the Patrician is the least bad of all the bad options, who governs a complex of pluralistic interest groups by balancing one against another, with a direct kind of utilitarianism ("The Patrician didn’t believe in unnecessary cruelty.* While being bang alongside the idea of necessary cruelty, of course.") – a proto-democrat, as such.
