What’s the worst that could happen when King Charles visits Donald Trump in Washington later this month? And what would be the best outcome from Keir Starmer’s perspective, since it is the Prime Minister who has given the direction to go ahead with the trip in the hope of improving our tattered, so-called special relationship? While this relationship is clearly still meaningful to Britain, it no longer makes much sense to America – especially now.
The king goes where he is told, whether he would prefer to stay at home or not. This time in a land whose President decries our aircraft carriers as toys and accuses us of cowardice, and whose Defense Secretary ridicules our Royal Navy. Perhaps Charles should wear his Navy Admiral’s uniform, medals and all, to the White House.
But what Charles really took to Washington is the monarchy’s greatest diplomatic asset: soft power. It is the ability to attract foreign governments, convincing them that it is a good person and that Britain is worth taking seriously – in business, culture or just tourism – and that we are a reliable ally with whom to do business, or shake hands across the ocean. Unfortunately, the Trump administration despises most of them, except possibly our golf courses, some of which are near the President, so Charles faces the most ticklish and potentially most consequential tour of his reign.
Such official foreign trips are carefully choreographed in advance, but it takes two to tango and it is extremely difficult to get Trump on message, increasingly so these days. He doesn’t follow protocol, so while we’re unlikely to see Trump tearing off a strip or two of the king in the Oval Office, surrounded by his smiling acolytes, as he did with Volodymyr Zelensky in February last year, Charles may hear himself ranting about the prime minister’s shortcomings, or indeed his plans for Canada, where it happens that Charles is also head of state. Trump has already violated protocol twice this week, albeit in minor matters, by describing Charles as a prince and revealing the dates of the visit – April 27 to 30 – which the palace tries to keep secret in advance for security reasons, usually not released until a week before the trip.
What does Charles do in those circumstances? Maintain respectful silence, or murmur softly that memories may vary?
These two men are hardly intellectual or spiritual soul mates. Trump has no time for environmentalism, holistic medicine, or architecture, unless it’s one of his own buildings. And the circumstances surrounding the meeting, in a state of war, were hardly favorable – some advisers thought it would be a good excuse to cancel the state visit, at least for now, although it would only anger the President but serve no useful purpose. Perhaps it was not deemed worth provoking Trump’s anger further.
Of course, Charles has been playing the diplomatic game for decades. He knows how soft words calm anger and, having met Trump several times on the president’s British visits, he also knows how to flatter him, which seems to be the way to his simple heart. Elizabeth II was used to being distracted, purse-clutching, or rummaging around in her handbag for something if things were getting really sticky.
She was known to show obvious irritability only once on any of her 266 foreign trips: to Morocco in 1980, when the temperamental King Hassan II kept changing the itinerary and kept her waiting for hours in boiling weather. He also met as guests at Buckingham Palace with Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena – both convicted of genocide and executed in 1989 – and did not complain when Trump passed them while inspecting the guard of honor at Windsor Castle on his first state visit in 2019. He, naturally, believed that he was his favorite president; Apparently he thought he was very rude.
Elizabeth II went completely smoothly during her six visits to the United States, with the 14 presidents she met, from Truman to Trump (Lyndon B. Johnson was the only person who served during her reign), generally receiving her respectfully. The days when American politicians reacted skeptically to British monarchs ended in the mid-19th century, with only occasional exceptions, such as Big Bill Thompson, the notoriously corrupt mayor of Chicago during the prohibition days, and Al Capone, who declared that if he ever visited the Windy City he would “turn around and punch” King George V. Presumably he knew that the King, who was not much liked by the Americans, was unlikely to ever come (and never did), but Thompson believed it would play well with his Irish and German voters – and they re-elected him three times.
Otherwise royal visitors have generally been popular there, ever since 19-year-old Bertie, Queen Victoria’s eldest son – and the future Edward VII – embarked on a four-month tour of North America in 1860, to be greeted by enthusiastic crowds in New York. When he attended an opera in Philadelphia an audience even stood to sing God Save the Queen. Sadly, such difficult circumstances were ended by the death of his father and the outbreak of the American Civil War.
In 1939, three months before the Second World War began, the visit of George VI and his wife, the future Queen Mother, Elizabeth, was credited with significantly improving Anglo-American relations. He was the first monarch to visit the US and went at the personal invitation of President Franklin Roosevelt, who – as evidenced by this month’s visit – did not approve of the appeasement policy of the Chamberlain government. As Eliot, the president’s son, said: “Father wanted the reception … to serve as a symbol of American affinity for a country whose current political leadership he did not trust.”
For once, it was a trip that took place on the orders of the American government rather than the British.
The journey was a triumph. The king and queen were seen as vivacious and amiable – “We ate things I think are called hot dogs,” he wrote to his 13-year-old daughter – and helped ease American hostility after the abdication crisis, when Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry an American, and the First Irish War of Independence. The New York World Telegram wrote, “We like them. And we hope they like us.” However, this did not speed up American military involvement in the war.
So will soft power win this time? What mainly works in the king’s favor is that Trump feels he has a connection with Britain, as his mother was a Scottish immigrant to the US. He says at the moment that he thinks Raja is a great man and a great king, so there are such thin threads of hope. Charles will be friendly and will not cause change of heart. Will this bring any change in Anglo-American relations? Maybe for a few days, at least, start using Starmer as a convenient punch bag before Trump returns. The President is probably as ignorant of British constitutional decorum as he appears to be of American constitutional decorum.
No visit is entirely incident-free, and the palace has already said the king will not meet a delegation of Epstein victims to discuss his brother’s behavior nor hear their stories directly. He has a reasonable excuse, while the police inquiry against Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor continues in the UK, so he has already expressed sympathy, so he can’t say anything more. However, this will not stop questions from being raised.
The obvious reason for this visit is the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence from Britain. The late queen not only attended the bicentennial celebrations in 1976, but also reigned long enough to attend both the 350th anniversary of the founding of the English settlement of Jamestown in 1957 (conceived as a fence-mending trip after the previous year’s Suez debacle) and the 400th anniversary in 2007.
This time expect to see “No Kings” banners and protesters, but their target will not be Charles, but Trump’s apparently monarchical ambitions. George III, the king who lost America, remains a convenient figure of revelry across the Atlantic: half comic madman, half tyrant. George’s greeting to future President John Adams, the first American ambassador, to the Court of St. James’s in 1785 after the war has been largely forgotten: “I was the last man to consent to the separation, but (it) having happened and becoming inevitable, I have always said … that I would be the first to vindicate the friendship of the United States as an independent power.”
As one of the peace conference delegates pointed out to his opposite number, it did not matter because the Americans of the future would speak English, not French. Relationships really last a long time and go very deep. Charles can always console himself that his visit is America’s, not just Trump’s — and that presidents are term limited, while he, at least for now, is not.
