Donald Trump’s White House does not do soft power. On Tuesday afternoon, King Charles delivered a masterclass in nuanced diplomacy as he addressed the US Congress in a careful speech, laced with reminders of our nations’ shared democratic commitment to “the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances”. Even before he finished speaking, the Trump administration had reverted to its default vocabulary: online rage-bait.
A photograph shared across the White House’s social media platforms showed the King and President together, laughing as they waved to crowds. In block capitals, the caption: “TWO KINGS”. Donald wasn’t targeting his friend Charlie – far from it. was deliberately calibrated to wind up American liberals and leftists, particularly those who last month joined the latest in a series of “No Kings” protests, denouncing the President’s accretion of executive power.
But whether Trump cares it or not, it will also embarrass his British guest. The incident serves as a reminder of the golden rule of diplomatic engagement with Trump. However hard America’s allies work to engage with nuance and care, this President will reframe the terms of the conversation with a single tweet.
Does Trump understand what it means to be a king? Not in the sense that Charles defines it. Charles is a constrained king who in his younger years made no secret of his yen for greater political power; Trump is a politician who longs to be a king. Yet, although Charles seemed to deliver a warning this week to America’s political class, the Washington he visits serves as its own warning to the UK about the risks of untrammelled populism for our own future.
Charles pegged his pitch for transatlantic democratic values to both the Magna Carta and the English Parliament’s Declaration of Rights of 1689. The latter is lesser known, but a more radical warning when delivered from one monarch to another wannabe.
When the political class of the 1680s effectively deposed James II, and invited his daughter and son-in-law Mary and William of Orange to be the first to reign in a new, constitutional model of monarchy, this was the document read out publicly to the new sovereigns to define the ways in which their predecessor overreached. Every British monarch since joins in an unspoken covenant never to make the same mistakes.
When William and Mary were warned off such overreach, they were hostages to a parliamentary institution which had recently executed King Charles I. Nearly 350 years later, and 250 years after the American founding fathers built their constitution from the same vocabulary, King Charles III clearly understands these limits on kingship; Trump finds them alien.
Charles has no choice. He is the representative of a neutered monarchy – and as his years of “black spider” memos to politicians makes clear, he has not always appreciated the limits that he celebrated this week. Meanwhile, for all that British monarchists like to harrumph about the potential value of the throne to check the excesses of populist politicians, that bluff was called when Boris Johnson illegally prorogued parliament in 2019.
Buckingham Palace tore its collective hair out about but decided it could not refuse Johnson’s request to prorogue. (Charles and William, characteristically, let their rage be known.) The question was as much moral as legal. In a modern nation that has long outgrown the Stuart belief in the “Divine Right of Kings”, our monarchs lack any moral authority to oppose the decisions of a democratically elected leader – especially one who claims to be enforcing the mandate of a direct referendum. Imagine the fate of the monarchy if the late Queen had been seen to be obstructing Brexit.
True, a British monarch can still deliver well-honed speech in Washington to impress a gilded plutocrat. (Bravo to that speechwriter.) Yet, Trump will be under no illusions about Charles’s fundamental weakness. Why else would he have cynically penned in the King on the subject of Iran, asserting that “Charles agrees with me even more than I do”? It was the ploy of a politician who knows that he has a voice his visitor entirely lacks, freely going off-script while his guest’s team frantically cable their political masters for the “line to take”.
Trump is a man with a nose for where power really lies. He may envy the Windsors’s dynastic longevity, even if this week it was gently used against him. (Charles’s speech also functioned as a signal of hope to the Democrats, hinting that this administration is a flash in the pan to a family who have dealt with JFK and Roosevelt.) But Trump wouldn’t really like to be Charles III of England.
Instead, he is building his own monarchical court, its new aristocrats all visible in their bling this week. The tech oligarchs dutifully rolled up to do homage at the state dinner: Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Tim Cook. Like many kings, his enemy is the middle-class intelligentsia; his superpower is his almost religious hold over the imagination of the masses. “Checks and balances”, to quote King Charles, were supposed to hold him back. They failed.
Checks and balances – as personified by the King – are supposed to hold back rabid populist power in this country too. Charles was sent to Congress to signal that these transatlantic liberal frameworks may yet endure in America. Yet, it may be that the warning should be understood in the reverse direction. The next UK government may be a Reform outfit; even before then, we are likely to see a rash of councils taken by the Greens. Both, though they may deny it, are populists; both contain leading figures with a dangerous approach to modern secular democracy. Checks and balances have failed in America. If we are so perverse as to believe our monarchs are still the best guardians of democracy, they may soon fail here too.
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