When President Trump made his first state visit to Britain in 2019, it was privately seen by the royal family as throwing open Buckingham Palace to a political phenomenon whom Britons viewed as a comical aberration. Back then, the 93-year-old Queen Elizabeth II presided over a glittering tiarafest that had been carefully calibrated to thrill America’s 45th president. But there was an undertone of cosplay to all the swankery, summed up in Camilla’s playful wink to a member of her security detail during a photo op at Clarence House with the Trumps. The moment went viral the next day.
This week, for Mr. Trump’s second state visit — an unprecedented honor for a U.S. president — the mood is darker. Mr. Trump is no longer the amusing soap opera president. He’s a bullying global force, unafraid of launching tariff torpedoes or, off and on, threatening to throw Eastern Europe to the wolves of Russia. And his angry populism is spreading: On Saturday tens of thousands of far-right protesters — amped up by a shocking video cameo from Elon Musk, who urged them to “fight back” — jammed the streets of central London.
Windsor Castle, where Mr. Trump will be pomped and circumstanced this week, has a hushed, more grave, more historic vibe than the ostentatious splendor of Buckingham Palace, which, as Stephen Fry, the author, actor and pal of King Charles III, told me, probably has more “appeal to the kind of out-and-out vulgarian of the Goldfinger variety and feels like there’s a convention going on in there somewhere.”
Windsor is also in many ways a more apt venue to host the bellicose second-term Mr. Trump. It’s a fortress as well as a royal home, originally erected by William the Conqueror to repel invaders in the 11th century. The president will proceed past dour displays of medieval pikes, eye-gouging lances and the thrusting spears of lethal halberds.
Mr. Trump, who just rebranded the Defense Department as the Department of War, might get a kick out of the shining spectacle of King Henry VIII’s massive suit of armor, which lacks only the obese Tudor king’s monumental metal codpiece. (It’s a pity Mr. Trump can’t try the armor on; he and the despotic Henry have in common a deep affinity for gold, profound germophobia and a fondness for the plunderous disruption of sacred institutions.)
What does Britain hope to get out of treating a president most of its citizens loathe to a second blast of full-on pageantry? For the flailing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose favorability rating is gurgling around 24 percent and who has just had to sack his Washington ambassador, Peter Mandelson, over his overly warm correspondence with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, it’s a chance to announce new deals worth billions and look like a leader in control.
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