King Charles’s high-stakes America trip

I thought about entitling this note, “The sanity of Charles III”. Then it occurred to me that some readers might not know Alan Bennett’s stage play, The Madness of George III and thus miss my wordplay. Either way, Charles’s four-day visit to the US next week and his address to Congress will be taking place in a time of madness. In recent weeks, speculation has resurged about the 25th amendment being invoked to remove an increasingly unhinged Donald Trump from office. From threatening to destroy an ancient civilisation to presenting himself as Jesus and embarking on an Easter feud with Pope Leo XIV, Trump has really upped his game of late. Though I imagine Charles would rather be doing crossword puzzles, or even hanging out with Andrew, his duty is to pull off a successful American visit. Indeed, this is probably his most difficult challenge since being crowned. He will need to avoid provoking an increasingly angry Trump — towards Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer in particular and Nato in general — while signalling broader sympathy with America’s deeper values. His job, in other words, will be to thread a royal needle. 

Getting that speech right will take some labour. In addition to observing his mother’s interactions, Charles has picked up more American experience than many might suppose. The first US president he met was Dwight Eisenhower when he was just ten and wearing a kilt at a Balmoral family barbecue. Little over a decade later, Richard Nixon, tried to pair Charles off with his daughter, Tricia, whom he sent to Caernarfon to watch Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales. Charles was subsequently invited to stay at the White House along with his sister, Princess Anne. Romance did not occur between him and Tricia. “Subtlety was never Nixon’s strong suit,” writes Susan Page in her entertaining recent book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History. “His apparent efforts to get the world’s most eligible young bachelor romantically interested in his daughter were an open secret in Washington.” Charles has met every US president since Nixon, barring Gerald Ford. Elizabeth II got along well with the latter during the republic’s 200th anniversary celebrations in 1976. 

Half a century later, Charles could do worse than consult what his mother said in her speech to Congress in 1991, which is the only previous occasion on which a British monarch has spoken on Capitol Hill. Reading her address today gives an odd sensation. Though her speech reflected Britain’s priorities at the time — paramount of which was sustaining transatlantic ties in the post-cold war era — its sentiment works now. “Our two countries have a special advantage in seeking to guide the process of change because of our rich ethnic and cultural diversity of both our societies,” Elizabeth said. “Stability in both our countries depends on tolerance and understanding between different communities.” In addition to plugs for the United Nations and the European Union, she warned against the cult of force. “Some people believe that power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” she said. “So it can, but history shows that it never grows well nor for very long. Force, in the end, is sterile.” Alas, such words from Charles today would seem aimed at Trump and will thus not be uttered.

Yet he has one or two advantages his mother lacked. Chief of these is that no US lawmaker has said they will boycott Charles’s speech. Led by Joe Kennedy II, a group of Irish-American congressmen refused to attend the Queen’s address in 1991. Protesters flanked the Capitol. Today, almost 30 years after the Good Friday Agreement, the British monarchy is viewed more benignly. “I don’t want my grandmother to come back and haunt me,” says Brendan Boyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat whose district includes Independence Hall. Boyle, a proud Fenian, is the only lawmaker to have one parent born in Ireland, as well as all four grandparents. “But this will be a welcome occasion to celebrate our 250th birthday. Charles is the head of state of an important ally. I hope he figures out a way to say that we are historically a force for democracy in the world together and how in the past we have confronted authoritarianism.”

Which brings me to the strangest aspect of Charles’s visit. Anti-Trump forces have periodically marched under the “No Kings” rallying cry. Obviously their target is Trump, not Charles. Most of my American friends — whether monarchist or antimonarchist — expressed sympathy for Charles having to host Trump on his state visit last year. Such affinity-by-default has not dimmed. It would be something if the visiting king could find some way of conveying his sympathy for them without provoking him. 

My colleague, Brooke Masters, the FT’s US managing editor in New York, has kindly agreed to reply this week. Brooke, you’re an American who has lived for a number of years in London. How do you view Charles’s visit? Do you think he can thread that needle?

Recommended reading

Swampians with long memories might recall that I wrote last year about how Trump was making the monarchy great again following Charles’s opening of the Canadian parliament in Ottawa.

My column this week looked at why America is falling out of love with Israel. “There should be no mystery why younger Americans are as pro-Palestinian today as their forebears were once pro-Israeli,” I write. “Rabin staked his life on peace. What will posterity say of Netanyahu?” 

My colleague Simon Kuper wrote a characteristically original and thoughtful column on that creeping feeling that life is getting too long, while AI is only fuelling our helplessness. “There’s the famous story of a child pointing to Randolph Churchill, the great man’s son, and asking its mother, ‘What is that man for?,’” writes Simon. “Soon we could all be Randolph.” 

Forgive me for dipping back into insanity but do read this excellent Atlantic essay by Sarah Fitzpatrick on Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI director. Her portrait is deeply troubling, although, given Patel’s brief, which is chiefly to investigate Trump’s enemies, perhaps we should be grateful that he is missing in action for such large chunks of time. 

Brooke Masters replies

Like many Americans, I have a complicated relationship with the British monarchy. We’re taught to hate the tyrannical King George III at school, and he’s the villain in the popular musical Hamilton. But our glossy magazines follow the ups and downs of the current royal family as avidly as they do any pop star. I vividly remember Diana dancing with John Travolta at the White House when she was still married to Charles and Elizabeth II’s 1991 visit to Washington. Someone forgot to give Her Majesty a step stool and she looked like a disembodied hat behind a podium during her main speech.  

In some ways, King Charles is lucky on the timing of this visit — a few years earlier, feelings would have been running high against the Windsors for what was then perceived as their mistreatment of their American in-law, Meghan Markle. But later excesses have shifted the balance of sympathy. Similarly, Charles’s once irritating lectures about architecture now seem quaintly attractive in comparison to the gold-encrusted White House ballroom and the planned Trump arch. On the downside, the King does have to face the embarrassment of former Prince Andrew’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, but much of Washington has at least second-hand ties to that particular paedophile.

Charles may be unable to avoid a Trump explosion: it is increasingly hard to predict what will set off another angry rant. But the US president’s falling popularity has reduced the stakes for the targets of his rage, and the UK already has a trade deal, for good or ill. Rather than seek to make Trump happy, as any number of DC visitors have tried and failed to do, King Charles would do better to concentrate on seeming calm, collected and reasonable. He is bound to benefit from the comparison.