The English-born American founding father, Thomas Paine, had little time for kings. In his 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense, which called for American independence from Great Britain, Paine gave short shrift to King George III. America has no earthly king, he thundered, only one who “reigns above”. And this heavenly monarch “doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Great Britain”.
The United States has had an ambivalent relationship with the British monarchy, then, for as long as the United States has existed. But while this relationship is certainly “special” in the ironic sense, that revolutionary legacy of republican hostility often seems tempered with something warmer. If anything, the hostility more frequently seems to flow the other way. The British institutional reaction to Edward VII’s relationship with American divorcée Wallis Simpson was scorn at a perceived social inferior and gold-digger. In America, though, the response was curiosity at the American woman who had captured the heart of a king. More recently, at least to begin with, something of the same mood surrounded the marriage of Prince Harry and the American actress Meghan Markle.
The current President of the United States, too, is known to be a fan of the British monarchy: he paid a warm tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth II on her death in 2022. So today, as Donald Trump begins his first state visit since his Presidential inauguration in January, everyone around Keir Starmer is hoping that a dose of royal pomp and ceremony will pour balm on a “special relationship” that has, latterly, looked more than a little threadbare.
Will it work? The day and a half Trump will spend in the UK is programmed like the most high-end imaginable private tour of Museum Britain, that curated subset of the British Isles popular with tourists eager to see the “typical England” of their imagination (and of the oeuvre of Richard Curtis). Should official Britain succeed in containing Trump in this museum zone, suitably diverted with guards of honour, a Red Arrow fly-by, historic carriages, lavish banquets, and a visit to Windsor, plus the undivided attention of the Royal Family, the cumulative effect will no doubt be enjoyable for Trump, if also hermetically insulated from the Britain the rest of us live in.
Meanwhile, it speaks volumes about the restive mood of Britain as an un-curated whole that there will be no public procession; in fact, no public-facing element at all. This is reportedly because of security fears, in the face of far-Left agitation. But what if it’s also to minimise the risk of Trump seeing those parts (or denizens) of the country that aren’t part of the Museum Britain picture, and forming too accurate an impression of how the rest of us live? Worse still, what if it afforded us too accurate an assessment of our own leadership? If officials want to spare Trump the sight of (for example) Birmingham’s cat-sized rats, or indeed our thriving national business in supplying free seaside accommodation for undocumented workers, it may also be too awkward to display in public our poorly, footling constitutional King, beside the brash, bouffant, and genuinely ascendant Trump.
This is, after all, a man who, despite being formally a president, has far closer to monarchic powers than any current British leader, either crowned or elected — and who, besides, leads the West’s foremost superpower. What if Britons looked at Trump side-by-side with King Charles, and drew the wrong conclusion about which of the two was more kingly?
“This is a man who has far closer to monarchic powers than any current British leader, either crowned or elected.”
I’m being a little facetious here, but not entirely. Charles’ mother, Elizabeth II, reigned during a post-war political consensus that viewed nation-states as on their way to obsolescence, and the future a bright one of internationalism. Her reign was one of dignified stoicism in the face of relentless diminishment to a cryptic cipher: the sole speck of absolutist grit in the liberal-democratic oyster. Concurrent with her death, though, that future has vanished. History is back with a vengeance, as are strongman leaders.
And as the United States continues its tumultuous slide toward fully post-liberal governance, a corresponding aesthetic shift is afoot — of which, like it or not, Trump is a leading edge. The incumbent ruling class doesn’t like it: from the FT’s performative shuddering at Trump’s “turning the White House into Mar-A-Lagoland”, to the New York Times’ prim distaste at the way his gilded décor evokes “the crudeness of the times”, everyone who did well in the spreadsheet-brained Clinton/Obama salad days of management consultants and financialisation thinks he’s ghastly. But outside Bluesky and the rarefied world of wealthy progressives, it seems, the world likes ghastly.
And no wonder. History is well and truly back: the world is no longer borderless, or, conversely, is more borderless than electorates would like. War is back on the menu, even in Europe. The same America that dismantled the British Empire in the name of national self-determination is murmuring about colonising overseas territories. But nor is this the old industrial age of standing armies and tanks and planes; today, it’s data cables, terrorism, liminal warfare, bot farms and drones. Biotech is proliferating: Silicon Valley mavericks are gene-editing their babies. The vibe shift is here; it’s weird, and loud, and more than a little sci-fi.
Against this, it’s the dressed-down technocrats of the Obama era that feel obsolete, along with their sans-serif fonts and “discreet luxe”. And this plus the obvious popularity of Trump with at least a large subset of his own electorate all points to a possibility that no one but America’s progressive “No Kings” protesters (and perhaps Curtis Yarvin) wants to consider: that if any Western state today can be said to have as its leader something approximating a Royal Brute, it’s America.
Emanations from the vicinity of the Palace suggest that His Majesty King Charles is, like his great-great-great-grandmother Victoria, not amused. Back in July, a nameless “friend of the monarch” told (of all outlets) the Daily Beast that Charles is worried Trump will use his upcoming visit to embarrass British officials on the topic of immigration into Europe. Trump has, after all, already called the inflow of migrants from Africa and Asia “a horrible invasion that is killing Europe”, a remark that the King’s unnamed friend says “appalled” Charles, after a “lifetime promoting tolerance and compassion”.
It is of course impossible to know whether or not this nameless source spoke to the press with the King’s support or not. There have been other such suggestions of dislike, which indicate this may really reflect Charles’ views. If it does, he would only be echoing every other upper-class idealist of the boomer generation who took John Lennon’s Imagine as prophecy, and really believed that history had ended and that tolerance and compassion could now bloom forever. Even so, this naïve partiality shows Charles in an unfavourable light compared to his mother, who both had her own views on politics and nonetheless remained perfectly reserved through a lifetime of duty as Britain’s figurehead.
Arguably, though, it shows him in a still more unfavourable light compared to Trump himself. For however ghastly Obama liberals (and perhaps also Charles III) think Trump is, the Donald’s breezy insistence on saying whatever the hell he likes is far more kingly than any amount of passive-aggressive whispering to the press via underlings, no matter how you gussy that up as royal stoicism.
To be fair to Charles, he is in a difficult position. He presides over a skint and increasingly fractured post-imperial rump Britain. His own royal legacy is bound up with a Commonwealth whose membership includes many countries that obviously, actively view Great Britain as at best a mark to shake down for “reparations” or remittances, if not an active enemy. At the same time, support for the constitutional monarchy of which he is a head persists mainly among small-c conservative Middle Englanders for whom, in the age of mass migration, Charles’ avowed internationalism and extension of “imagined community” to the Commonwealth feels at best misguided if not, according to some more febrile social media posters, actively treacherous.
Amid all these tensions, perhaps Charles feels he has no choice but to communicate his views obliquely, in hints and whispers. But the unfavourable comparison between Charles III and Donald Trump is not just about confidence. It’s also about power, and the freedom to aestheticise power: a willingness to “just do things”, as the kids say, and to be a bit extra as you do it. The ancients framed this as a virtue, “magnificence”, meaning to spend in accordance with your rank, especially on goods of wider civic value, such as ornate architecture.
It would be a stretch to call (for example) Trump’s remodelling of the White House Rose Garden as an exclusive private members’ club “magnificent” in this sense; the logic is too commercial. But when Henry VIII demolished a thousand years of monastic history, he did so to realise their value, to fund his wars and lavish spending. Today, the bloom of gold across every White House surface speaks to a similar sensibility: one ruthlessly focused on realising assets and then exerting power through displays of wealth and, where necessary, the recently re-titled Department of War. If Britain were ruled today by a Henry VIII rather than a Charles III, would a man known in the sixteenth century for his quick temper, unpredictability, vast appetite and, of course, numerous wives be more like our current monarch, or more like Trump? I think we all know the answer.
Many American republicans, of both the small- and large-R variety, are proud of their national origin story, in which a war of independence was fought to escape the yoke of “the Royal Brute of Great Britain”. But in a twist of fate, 250 years on they appear to have gained a magnificence-loving leader of their own, one whose mercurial, Henrician forcefulness so completely eclipses the impotent, passive-aggressive titular monarch of now much-less-great Britain, let alone its insipid, technocrat PM, as to make the old country look weirdly leaderless.
But perhaps the more accurate assessment is that Britain is not leaderless at all. Rather, we are de facto ruled as a province from imperial Washington, by something far closer to the old-fashioned kind of king. And from this perspective, the dissident agitating for independence isn’t some American Thomas Paine. Rather, it is King Charles, impotently signalling via nameless aides his resentment at the subordination of his kingdom to the Royal Brute of Greater Britain.
