Donald Trump Entertains The King Of England, And The No Kings Crowd Says, 'See, What Did We Tell You?'

The American public loves British royalty.  Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey were both long-running serials. Victorian England has always had a hold on America.  Empire, Churchillian values, confidence, reverence for God, King, and Country, the discipline of Eton and Harrow that made leaders of men; and above all, pomp and ceremony. 

In all Edwardian soap operas we may have rooted for the scullery maid or the footman, enjoyed the camaraderie and earthy enjoyment of the staff, but we cared only for the toffs.

Victorian and Edwardian England seems remote, but the images of an even earlier England, that of the imperial King George who ruled us in the 1700s, are American emblems.  Our Founding Fathers looked like Englishmen, dressed like them, behaved as aristocratically as their forefathers, built English-style homes as graceful and elegant as the country manors of England.



Our Eastern city neighborhoods are English. Georgetown, Beacon Hill, and Rittenhouse Square are like South Kensington or Holland Park.

Americans idolize their movie stars.  Although their glitzy, glamorous lives are far beyond our reach, they are not that far. Thousands of women have looked in the mirror and seen a face as classically beautiful as Angelina Jolie or as pouting and sexy like Scarlett Johansson. With a little luck and a few connections, one might be in Hollywood too, they say.

Aristocratic England is all the more appealing because it is remote and impossibly unattainable. We would fumble and drop our forks at Downton Abbey or trip over the Persian carpet at Montpelier.  English Lords and their estates, fox hunting, understatement, and chauffeurs are way beyond us.  We can imagine having a beer with Matthew McConaughey, but not the Third Earl of Hereford. 

The administration of John F Kennedy was called Camelot because it came as close to English aristocracy as possible for an American republic.  Americans disregarded the fact that Jack was a shanty Irish son of a crooked bootlegger and looked only to the sophistication, high culture, and royal taste of the president and his wife.  Robert Frost, poet emeritus of America read verse at Kennedy's inauguration.  Pablo Casals, renowned cellist played at state dinners.  Jackie refurnished the White House in simple, early American and classic European style. 

Camelot came close to Buckingham Palace but not that close.  Beneath it all Kennedy was as much of an Irish bar fighter as his father.  

The images of all the Trump-hating, No Kings zealots smiling while applauding King Charles III speech to Congress was an example of this royal idolatry.  Charles was the King of England after all, heir to thousands of years of aristocratic rule, the greatness of empire, the civilizing rule of the dark regions of the world, the genesis of democracy and the rule of law.  In those moments when he stood before the Congress and spoke in his plummy, marvelously elegant way, all thoughts of colonialism, white supremacy, predatory rule disappeared. He was an example of rule beyond politics, generosity, and good will swept away such ideas, and the room was his. 

The No Kings claques in the audience, caught off guard by their smiling, welcoming applause, quickly regained their form as they mingled in the rotunda, whispering innuendoes and suggestions about Donald Trump and his regal ambitions.  But the chatter was toned down, circumspect, and in fact quite compromised.  If this - that is, the elegant, composed, supremely patrician Charles - was kingship, maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. 

Vicki Barton had been in the phalanx of the No Kings protests in Washington. A fiercely harsh and demanding woman, she took all the ills of kingship on her shoulders and marched with a heavy burden.  The President of the United States, Donald J Trump had every intention of becoming a king.  Well, not exactly.  This crass, unschooled, brute could never match Louis XIV, Henry VIII, or the great shahs, emperors, and czars of of the world; and his reign would be a meretricious affair; but kingship has many faces.  Look at what Caligula did to Rome. 

Now, if Trump could be like Charles, Vicki thought as the King of England made his way through official Washington, very properly attired, gentlemanly, and acting with grace and charm, then she might think differently, but Trump was a rube, a clown, a second-rate vaudevillian.  'I hate him', she said, hoping this bit of venom would dispel these traitorous thoughts. 

Vicki never looked past the end of her nose when it came to politics.  Donald Trump was ipso facto an evil man, the very incarnation of evil, a man endowed with every Satanic ambition and hatred of humankind as this patron.  What more was there to say?  What parsing, what exegesis, what logical deconstruction was necessary? He was already testing the extrajudicial waters with ICE and DOGE, running roughshod over the Constitution, preparing for a fourth term and the consolidation of a Republican conservative monarchy ad perpetuam. 

This invitation of King Charles was a carefully-planned ploy on Trump's parts.  He wanted to show the world that this is what kings and kingship was all about - the embodiment of history, the motherlode of culture.  Charles was Britain just as De Gaulle had said, 'La France, c'est moi'. 

After all, that was what Trump had always wanted to convey.  He would restore the central ethos of America enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, bring forward the principles that are at the foundation of the Republic, represent them, promote them, incorporate them.  He would be, like the kings of England, embody the best of his nation's culture. 

This was the most serious reasoning Vicki had ever given to any idea since struggling with her philosophy final at Vassar those many years ago, and she found it confusing.  There was something to this idea of a harmonizing ethos, a reverence and invocation of history, and an avowed patriotism; but at the same time he was a racist, misogynist, capitalist tool.  What was a mother to do?

This befuddlement was on the faces of the No Kings partisans in Congress, the cabal of screechy Squad harridans; the alte kockers who had pushed their soggy ideas of progressivism for years as their union card, their ticket to election victory in solidly Democratic districts; and the hangers-on and wannabes who actually believed that Kamala Harris would have made a good president and that the time for dumping white people into the Potomac had finally come. 

This gentleman of English royalty gave them pause for the first time in years.  O, if he were only king of America, then things would be right again.  It was the kindly image of Charles who brought the real nastiness of kingship to the fore.  Against his warm, welcoming, charitable man were the real autocrats, dictators, and tyrants of the world - Idi Amin, Mobutu, Bokassa, Kagame, Deby, Kim, and a thousand more human predators. Trump, as demonic as he was, was a far cry from these murderers. 

Vicki turned off the television - she had been watching the king's visit since his plane set down at Andrews Air Force base - and sat looking out her picture window.  She must refill the birdfeeder, she thought, and the begonias needed trimming.  The usual bile she felt after watching the news wasn't there for the first time in weeks.  The urge to go out in the streets and tear off her clothes in protest of the evil man in the White House was surprisingly absent.  What was happening?  Without the hatred, the bile, the venomous thoughts, she was an empty vessel.  Trump hate had not only consumed her for years but had become her.  She would be nothing without it. 

And there he was, standing with the king and queen showing them the Presidential beehive and basking in their praise.  He, Trump, spawn of the devil, a beekeeper? But the bile still wouldn't rise.  It was a touching scene, a charitable one, a kindly one.  What was happening to her?

No Kings organizers shelved their plans for more rallies and demonstrations. Somehow after Charles' visit, they didn't seem to make much sense.  'Maybe Kings', suggested one conservative observer, who had always been amused at the old Sixties matrons marching every which way to protest Trump, white biddies for whom the jamboree was a nice outing.  'I'll miss them', he said, but of course like everything else he said, it was tongue in cheek.  Good riddance was what he meant.