King Charles and Queen Camilla Come to Washington

In an interview with Sky News, Trump denigrated Starmer, whose policies he characterized as “insane”; his political future, he said, depended on cracking down on immigration. (“They’re destroying your country.”) Charles, meanwhile, was a “great gentleman.” The King is the embodiment of the England that the President still likes: Windsor Castle, glossy magazine covers of Princess Diana. As Freddie Hayward, of The New Statesman, put it, “Instead of sending their hapless Prime Minister, they would work with the grain of Americans’ love for our royals.” He went on, “One official compared it to the King’s Speech in Parliament, where the monarch becomes the mouthpiece for the government.”

There is always glee in Washington in advance of royal visits. When Charles came in 1985, as a prince, the Post ran a hundred-and-sixteen-page supplement from the British Tourist Authority. This time, the most sought-after invitation was for a garden tea at the British Embassy, where members of Trump’s Cabinet joined the receiving line for the King. “I wasn’t invited, so my republicanism is hardening,” a British journalist told me. “The visit seems far more significant to Washington than it does to Westminster, where the press is more fixated on using the previous U.S. Ambassador to bring down the Prime Minister than on what the current U.S. Ambassador is doing with the King.” In D.C., he continued, “People here have switched from ‘No Kings’ to ‘O.K., one king, as long as he’s not ours.’ ”

And Trump, of course, enjoys royal cosplay. He has posted memes of himself as a monarch; this weekend, after an apparent assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, he told a CBS anchor, “If I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.” Just before the White House welcome ceremony, Trump responded to an article in the Daily Mail which suggested he might be a distant cousin of the King’s. “Wow, that’s nice,” the President wrote on Truth Social. “I’ve always wanted to live in Buckingham Palace!”

The speech on the South Lawn went beyond the usual pomp and circumstance. “For nearly two centuries before the Revolution, this land was settled and forged by men, women, who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British,” Trump said. “Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage, their hearts beat with an English faith.” This heritage, he said, was the foundation of liberty. “In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea. But the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776.”

A senior Administration official reacting to the speech told me that “republican ideas and Anglo-Saxon heritage are inextricable.” Last year, when Starmer said that England risked becoming an “island of strangers” owing to migration, he quickly apologized for his phrasing, which seemed to echo Enoch Powell’s notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech: “For reasons which they could not comprehend . . . they found themselves made strangers in their own country.” Many on the right in both countries seemed glad that Trump was willing to affirm what Starmer skirted around. Another reporter told me that Steve Bannon had sent him a text after the speech: “blood and soil—epic.”

A few hours later, the King travelled to the Capitol to give a joint address to Congress. When I arrived on the Hill, as Charles and House Speaker Mike Johnson were taking a ceremonial walk through Statuary Hall, my phone buzzed with the news that the Justice Department was again indicting James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, this time for an Instagram post in which he arranged seashells in a manner that allegedly threatened the President’s life.

Watching the House chamber from the viewing gallery before the speech was like peering into a garden party from above. Near me, in the audience, one man was dressed as George Washington. While Vice-President J. D. Vance sent the Congressional Escort Committee out to fetch the King, we got a news alert that the Federal Communications Commission was reviewing ABC’s broadcasting licenses. (Days before the W.H.C.A. dinner incident, the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel had joked that Melania had “a glow like an expectant widow.”) Across the Mall, Trump was posting on Truth Social that Germany was a failing nation. The King entered the chamber to a long standing ovation.