That the king’s arrival in the US was preceded by gunfire at the White House correspondents’ dinner set the tone for a visit that was built on the pretence that we were still living in normal times. Forget the Iran war, presidential rants about the British prime minister and growing political violence, it’s time for Charlie to smile for the camera.
Or at least, smile for the camera for a few highly controlled minutes and only if there’s no sound on that thing. Tuesday’s Oval Office meeting was held in private after British officials tried to avoid a repeat of the humiliating scenes between the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Donald Trump. You know a meeting is going to be a doozy when one side is afraid of anyone hearing it.
Experts have described the four-day trip as the toughest for US-British diplomacy since George VI met Franklin D Roosevelt to garner support on the eve of the second world war. Turning to a US president to help fight fascism, you say? How times have changed. Still, there are bridges to build! Historical bonds to renew! And few people are better placed than Charles (apparently). As one insider put it: “He reads all his papers and knows exactly what is going on.” I’m glad someone does.
It is hardly a new phenomenon for royal family members – or democratically elected politicians for that matter – to meet with heads of state who, how shall we put this, don’t pass the sniff test. But the scale of Trump’s misdeeds, combined with his recent insults to the British government, meant this was a trip in which the moral trade-offs that so often come with power were particularly apparent.
At times, it was hard to keep track of how many scandals we were meant to be collectively repressing. But look, there’s a cannon firing! Is that Tom Daley at the embassy? Oh, Melania is wearing Dior couture! This was a state visit that was less an exercise in diplomacy than full-throttle distraction and denial.
Not that everyone got the memo. On Tuesday, remarks by the new British ambassador to the US, Christian Turner, made it into the Financial Times in which he said it was “extraordinary” that scandals around Jeffrey Epstein had brought down a member of the royal family and senior officials in Britain “and yet here in the US, it really hasn’t touched anybody”. Turner is clearly rusty on the ground rules as he only took over the post of ambassador in February. Does anyone know what happened to the last guy? Haven’t heard much about it.
Still, nice that it didn’t stop Trump’s fun. After Charles delivered his historic address to Congress, the official White House social media accounts trolled us all by posting an image of Trump with the monarch and the caption: “TWO KINGS”.
Royalists often justify the existence of the monarchy in modern society by its “soft power”: the sort of political influence that’s achieved by banquets rather than bombs. On paper, Trump is the ideal mark: a man who responds to sycophancy and has a love for pomp and pageantry, maybe because it’s a reminder of a bygone era of autocratic rule in which he’d prefer to govern. As historian Anthony Seldon put it: Charles is “probably the one person in the world who Trump doesn’t want to offend”.
Perhaps. And yet a few days of joviality will hardly guarantee Trump’s ever-erratic affections for long, as Keir Starmer has found out the hard way. What will last far longer is the sense of complicity: that the indefensible has yet again been legitimised. There is the sense that no matter what lines are crossed – from the illegal war against Iran to ICE detentions and deaths – allies will look the other way.
That Charles courted Trump while failing to meet Epstein’s victims – or even mention them explicitly in his speech, as had been hoped – could hardly be a clearer message of who counts and who doesn’t, of which horrors are punished and which are excused.
That’s the price of doing business, you could say, or it is just the price we’ve agreed to pay. While the elites mingle at garden parties, Iranian children are buried under rubble. Smile for the camera. It’s what special friends do.
