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During her 70-year reign, Queen Elizabeth met almost every U.S. President from Dwight Eisenhower to Joe Biden. But it was in 1991, when she met with President George H.W. Bush, that she became the first British Monarch to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress.
The visit couldn’t have been better timed. President George H.W. Bush was riding sky-high popularity—76% approval in Gallup’s polling that same month!—after having painstakingly assembled an international coalition to win a clean war in the Middle East. Bush and Prime Minister John Major were thick as thieves. The United States was negotiating the final stages of tariff-reducing NAFTA and framing up what would become the World Trade Organization. Bush was in constant contact with Mikhail Gorbachev to stage-manage the structured collapse of the Soviet empire. The global economy was coming out of an economic recession and Washington was heading into its longest economic expansion in U.S. history.
When King Charles III on Tuesday follows in his late mother’s footsteps as the second British Monarch to address Congress, he will be doing so in a Washington unrecognizable from the Queen’s triumphant visit 35 years earlier. Donald Trump is facing the worst approval numbers of his second term—a meager 36% in Gallup’s latest surveys—as he leads an unpopular Iran War and aggravates allies around the world. Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer have been on the outs over the lack of Brits on the battlefield in Iran. Trump’s erratic tariffs, his contempt for NATO, and uneven support for Ukraine’s defense against a Russian invasion have left him fairly alone. Vladimir Putin seems uncanny in his management of a relationship with Trump despite the menace facing former Eastern Bloc nations. And while unemployment is low and the stock market is high, consumer confidence is down in the dumps, and the latest Fox News poll finds Democrats have the edge over Republicans on economic issues for the first time since 2010.
It’s hard to imagine Charles giving the kind of speech Elisabeth delivered to such glowing reviews. “Some people believe that power grows from the barrel of the gun,” the Queen said. “So it can, but history shows that it never grows well nor for very long. Force, in the end, is sterile. We have gone a better way; our societies rest on mutual agreement, on contract and on consensus.”
Elizabeth was notorious for her charm and savvy. On her first U.S. visit as sovereign in 1957, meeting with Eisenhower, she eased tensions between Washington and London over the Suez Canal even though she had nothing to do with the Eden government’s fumble. After her last meeting with an American President, Biden said the Queen reminded him of his mother as she quizzed him on Washington’s read on leaders in China and Russia and insisted on pouring the tea herself at Windsor Castle.
“She had, really, a lifelong love affair with America,” says Sir Christian Turner, the U.K.’s Ambassador to Washington. “It’s the only place she really came on vacation apart from Scotland. She traveled eight times here for the state visits, and then four other occasions.”
While Elizabeth became sovereign at 25, Prince Charles didn’t take on the job he was born for until he was 73. And while his mother was gentle with questions and suggestions, King Charles is unapologetic in chasing his agenda; after his first meeting with Trump in 2019, the President complained that the then-Prince wouldn’t stop yammering on about climate change in a meeting scheduled for 15 minutes but stretched to 90 minutes. This will be his 20th trip to the United States in total.
And yet, as King Charles begins a trip nominally pegged to the United States’ 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, he is somewhat uniquely positioned to break through with a monarchy-obsessed President who seems hellbent on making Washington look like the grand palaces of Old Europe.
“People probably don’t realize this, that the King travels on the advice of his government. So the decision to do the state visit was actually a recommendation of Keir Starmer’s government,” Turner says. “This is not about, necessarily, a relationship between President and King, President and Prime Minister. It’s much broader and deeper than that.”
That helps to explain why, when Trump returned to the White House, Starmer made a point of personally delivering the now-King Charles’ invite for the Trumps to make a second state visit, the first time a President has been given that double honor. Trump, of course, accepted and delighted last year in a second go-around of the trappings of royalty.
When Queen Elizabeth came on that 1991 trip, she spent 13 days visiting D.C., taking in a Baltimore Orioles’ baseball game, hosting a Royal Britannia dinner on the yacht, making a trip to Texas to meet former First Lady Lady Bird Johnson—the widow of the only President she did not meet during her reign—and dropping into Kentucky to check out horse breeding. It was an in-person diplomatic thank-you note to Bush 41 for helping a truly united coalition repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and an attaboy push as The West sought to land the collapse of the Soviet Union without losing any of its nukes.
King Charles will only be in the U.S. for four days. The farthest he plans to get from Washington is stops in New York, which will include a visit to the 9/11 Memorial—where he will attend a wreath laying with Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
While his mum had a true appreciation for yankee idealism, King Charles is less enamored with the United States, especially in an era when Pax Americana seems so far removed from the present. The words of his mum urging restraint and cautioning against attaining power through brute force could not find a stronger contrast than this moment.
— With reporting by Brian Bennett
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