Guest lists for White House state dinners have always been political rather than social documents. Avidly chewed over in Washington, they broadcast an administration’s priorities, favored businesses, top donors and media allies. They are supposed to reflect the country being honored.
By those standards, the Trump guest list for the state dinner for King Charles III of Britain and Queen Camilla on Tuesday night was another whack at norms in an administration that likes to shatter them.
Among the more than 100 guests were at least 10 American billionaires, six Fox News hosts, one Fox News executive, six conservative Supreme Court justices, numerous Silicon Valley tech titans and assorted friends of the president’s. There were no British cultural figures and, for that matter, a meager number of British overall. The British Embassy in Washington appears to have had limited input into the guest list.
There were also no Democratic politicians, which has been the case at other Trump state dinners.
Previous White House social secretaries took note.
“There’s no attempt to reach out to the other side,” said Gahl Hodges Burt, who was the White House social secretary for three years in the Reagan administration. “There are no clergy, there are no minority group representatives, there are no medical researchers, there are no vaccine developers. And I would have had the astronauts who just came back.”
Nevertheless, she said, “it’s an impressive group. And a group you would expect.”
It is unclear who put together the guest list, which is typically overseen by the White House social secretary, along with heavy input from the West Wing, the White House political operation and the White House liaison to Congress. Melania Trump, the first lady, has had no social secretary in her husband’s second term.
On Wednesday her press secretary, Nick Clemens, declined to comment on the guest list or how it was put together.
Jeremy Bernard, who was a White House social secretary in the Obama administration, said his goal was to have the guest lists reflect America. “It doesn’t seem like there was any attempt to make this look like something of the U.S. overall,” he said of the Trump list. “It’s more reflective of the U.S. right wing.”
In Mr. Trump’s first term, he said, he would speak to the social secretary at the time, Anna Cristina Niceta Lloyd. “She would call me and say, ‘Hey, we’re having a dinner in the Rose Garden. Tell me about the dinner you had in the Rose Garden.’ And I’d tell her about the lighting company. We shared stuff. There is no such person now.”
Most of the British guests on the list were members of the official party traveling from London, among them Clive Alderton, the principal private secretary to the king and queen, and Tobyn Andreae, the communications director of the royal household. The other British guests included Harry Lopes, Camilla’s son-in-law, and Otis Irwin, her grandnephew.
Also included were Keith Poole, the British tabloid veteran who is now editor in chief of The New York Post; Ruth Porat, the British American president and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google; and Rory McIlroy, the Northern Irish golfer who just won his second Masters.
Tina Brown, the British American journalist and the former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, who regularly shreds the Trump administration in her “Fresh Hell” Substack column (and who, needless to say, was not included on the guest list), called the document “absolutely classic.” In other words, she said, “it’s the cronies, the money, the conservative Supreme Court justices.” She mused that the English actress Helen Mirren and the English historian Simon Schama would have been good to include.
Michael LaRosa, who was the press secretary to Jill Biden, the former first lady, was of the view that Democratic White Houses were no different from the current one in their partisanship. “Obama invited liberal journalists and opinion writers, and we invited the whole MSNBC crowd and Nancy Pelosi and her daughter,” said Mr. LaRosa, who now works for Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm run by a top Trump fund-raiser.
The guest list for the dinner for the king and queen, he said, “didn’t strike me as unusual. It struck me as par for the course. I always think of these things in terms of internal politics. What donor do we need to prime for the next cycle? Who is not getting tender love and care?”
Notable names on the Trump guest list included David Ellison, the chief executive of Paramount; Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; Steve Schwarzman, the chief executive of the Blackstone Group; and Meg O’Neill, the chief executive of BP.
At a 2007 state dinner for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip during the George W. Bush administration, guests included Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, then the speaker of the House; Robin Roberts of ABC; and the British historian Martin Gilbert.
Katie Robertson contributed reporting from New York.
Elisabeth Bumiller writes about the people, politics and culture of the nation’s capital, and how decisions made there affect lives across the country and the world.
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