Britain’s King Charles and Queen Camilla began wrapping up their four-day state visit to the US with a very quick stop by the White House to bid farewell to US President Donald Trump yesterday, having already charmed him at a formal dinner two days prior.
After barely six minutes inside, Charles, whose heart has always been in the countryside, and Camilla departed to spend their final hours in small-town America and Appalachian wilderness: marching bands, Little League baseball, bluegrass music, Girl Scouts and the bird-filled Blue Ridge Mountains were all on the itinerary.
The official reason for the royal trip was to mark the 250th anniversary of the US winning its independence from monarchy and British colonial rule, cueing multiple wry jokes from Charles in speeches to Washington’s elite about his fourth great-grandfather George III being on the losing side of the American Revolutionary War.
But it was also designed to mend what Charles called in Tuesday’s state dinner with Trump an “unbreakable bond” and “indispensable alliance” between the two countries, lately strained by the UK, alongside other European allies, declining to join the two-month-old US-Israeli war against Iran.
It seemed to work. As enraged as he has been by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump told reporters at some length how fond he was of his “great friend” Charles the day after their dinner: “When you like the king of a country so much, it probably helps your relationship with the prime minister.”
Posing for photographs outside the White House’s South Portico yesterday morning, Trump, who sometimes revels in his political opponents denouncing him as a would-be King, pointed to the monarch and said: “He’s the greatest King, in my book.”
“Great people,” Trump, who ran on an anti-immigration platform, said toward the departing motorcade, after giving it a wave and a thumbs up. “We need more people like that in our country.”
What the president meant by “people like that” was unclear, although his staff may have provided a clue when they released a photograph of Charles and Trump smiling together earlier in the week with the briefest of captions: “TWO KINGS” followed by a crown emoji.
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