King Charles III demonstrated what seemed to be a master class in Trump II diplomacy at a state dinner in the East Room of the White House Tuesday night, delivering a speech with all the right ingredients in just the right amounts.
There was dry British understatement; jokes tailored to President Trump’s proclivities (a Coca-Cola toast and crack about “readjustments” to the East Wing); a little obsequiousness balanced with a little prodding about NATO; and the shiniest, Trumpiest of gifts.
“Mr. President,” the king said, “I am delighted to present to you, as a personal gift, the original bell which hung on the conning tower of your valiant namesake.” He gestured to an object that had been sitting under a golden cloth on a white pedestal beside him. The red-coated arm of an equerry shot forth to unveil a highly polished bell.
Etched quite clearly onto the bell’s surface were the words TRUMP 1944. Evidently there had been a submarine called HMS Trump, launched from a U.K. shipyard in 1944, that played a role in the Pacific during World War II.
At this, the president stood up from his chair and looked in awe at his new bell. He glanced over at his wife and raised his eyebrows, as if to say: You see that, honey?
“Should you ever need to get hold of us,” the king said, “well, just give us a ring!” The room burst into applause and the president, looking positively beatific, flashed the king a thumbs-up.
For so much of the night, Mr. Trump, dressed in a white tie, seemed like putty in the bejeweled hands of the monarch. There are few foreign figureheads who can work this president the way this king can. But even for the best of them, Mr. Trump can be tricky, and there was one moment at the state dinner when King Charles got a dose of that reality.
The president, who spoke before the king, was zipping through a chunk of his speech that was about all the places around the globe where the Yankees and the Brits fought side-by-side. “The beaches of Normandy, the frozen hills of Korea to the scorching sands of North Africa and the Middle East—”
He looked up from his script. “And we’re doing a little Middle East work right now, too, if you might know, and we’re doing very well,” he said, beginning to veer dangerously off-piste.
The president is currently quite angry at the British. They refuse to follow America into what they perceive to be yet another misadventure in the Middle East. He has responded by calling their aircraft carriers “toys” and by belittling their prime minister.
And now Mr. Trump was dredging up all of that unpleasantness at his nice state dinner, though, curiously, he would not bring himself to actually say the “I” word.
“We have military defeated that particular opponent,” he continued, “and we’re never going to let that opponent ever—” and then he stopped himself and blurted out: “Charles agrees with me even more than I do. We’re never going to let that opponent have a nuclear weapon.” And then it was back to his script.
Even on his very best behavior, Mr. Trump could not help but stir up some trouble. With just those nine little words — “Charles agrees with me even more than I do” — he risked drawing the king into the fray. As sovereign, this was exactly the sort of thing he tries to avoid.
But it was just a flash. And the president seemed supremely chuffed by the whole thing.
The king had started off his speech by acknowledging the mayhem that broke out over the weekend, when a gunman tried charging into the ballroom of the Washington Hilton while the president and first lady and most of the cabinet were inside. “Keep calm and carry on,” the king said.
His speech was threaded through with history. He talked about how he was 10 years old the first time he met an American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, at Balmoral. He recalled his mother’s “first Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill” — one of Mr. Trump’s idols — and the time that Sir Winston, while staying at the White House, “emerged naked from the bathtub to discover the door opening as President Roosevelt came in for a chat.”
“With rapier wit,” the king said, “the president cast aside any embarrassment by declaring that, ‘The prime minister has nothing to conceal from the president of the United States!’”
He was sly, making wisecracks at Mr. Trump’s expense that others might not have dared try. “You recently commented, Mr. President, that if it were not for the United States, European countries would be speaking German,” he said. “Dare I say that, if it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking French!”
The king reminded that his mother visited in 1957 to help put the “special” back into “the special relationship” after a crisis in the Middle East. And then came the punchline: “Nearly seventy years on, it is hard to imagine anything like that happening today.” There didn’t seem to be as much laughter at that one. Top members of the Trump administration including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were there in the room.
The list of people who the White House invited was a mix of Trump family members, media handmaidens, titans of tech and finance, plus the six Supreme Court justices from whom Mr. Trump demands unquestioning loyalty.
It was not immediately clear whether all who had been invited actually showed up, but the list of those who the White House wanted there for the big state dinner was in and of itself an interesting document to decode.
There were the business titans: Tim Cook; Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez; David Ellison; Marc Andreessen; Stephen Schwarzman; Isaac Perlmutter.
There was the delegation from Murdochland: Fox News’s chief executive Suzanne Scott and a flock of her highly paid talking heads including Jesse Watters, Bret Baier, Maria Bartiromo, Ainsley Earhardt, Greg Gutfeld, and Laura Ingraham; and also Keith Poole, who is the top editor of the New York Post, the also-owned-by-Rupert-Murdoch tabloid newspaper that Mr. Trump cherishes.
There was the Melania inner circle: Mrs. Trump’s decorator, Tham Kannalikham; her clothing designer, Hervé Pierre; her most trusted aide, Hayley Harrison; and her father, Viktor Knavs.
There were the Supreme Court Justices. Not all of them; just the six conservative ones.
And there were the Trump children: Ivanka and her husband Jared; Eric and his wife Lara; Tiffany and her husband Michael.
There was something comical about seeing the king and queen among the Trumpian court. But it all seemed to work out as intended. After the king finished speaking, Mr. Trump clapped him on the shoulder. “Great job,” he said. And then he looked over at his new Trump bell.
“That’s so beautiful.”