A Tale of Two Kings: Why Trump’s Admiration for Charles Is More Than Royal Flattery
King Charles III and Queen Camilla's state visit to the United States of America was a masterstroke of diplomacy, but it raises questions about Trump's continued flirting with the concept of monarchy.
King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s state visit to the United States was a masterclass in soft-power diplomacy. It was also wrapped in a fog of irony so thick that even Shakespeare might have found it a little heavy-handed.
There was, first of all, the simple fact of the visit itself: the King and Queen were deployed to smooth over tensions between UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and US President Donald Trump at a delicate moment in transatlantic relations. Then came the Epstein-shaped shadow hanging over the political class on both sides of the Atlantic, made all the more awkward by the continuing Mandelson scandal. And, of course, there was the almost comical symbolism of inviting the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to help launch celebrations for the semi-quincentennial year of the United States’ independence from the British Empire.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my particular gratitude to you all for the great honour of addressing this Joint Meeting of Congress and, on behalf of The Queen and myself, to thank the American people for welcoming us to the United States to mark this semi-quincentennial year of the Declaration of Independence.
And for all of that time, our destinies as Nations have been interlinked. As Oscar Wilde said, “We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language!”
Ladies and gentlemen, we meet in times of great uncertainty; in times of conflict from Europe to the Middle East which pose immense challenges for the international community and whose impact is felt in communities the length and breadth of our own countries.
— The King’s address to the Joint Meeting of Congress, 28 April 2026.
“Semi-quincentennial” – what a lovely word. Thank you for the vocabulary lesson, Your Majesty.
The deepest irony, however, lay elsewhere: in President Trump’s visible delight at being associated so intimately with the idea of monarchy, barely two months after the third wave of No Kings protests.
Trump has long flirted with autocratic language. He has joked about dictatorship, mused about serving beyond the constitutional limit, and repeatedly expressed admiration for rulers who exercise power with very few visible scruples. Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and Kim Jong-un belong to the gallery of strongmen for whom Trump has often reserved his most extravagant praise. In the American press, the question of Trump’s authoritarian impulses has become a sort of nervous undercurrent. Few people will say outright that he dreams of a crown, but many will make the joke in passing: assuming, of course, there are still midterms.
At first glance, King Charles III seems an odd addition to Trump’s pantheon of admired leaders. Charles does not rule with an iron rod. He does not command tanks, purge enemies, imprison opponents or govern by decree. He reigns within a constitutional monarchy shaped by centuries of reform, convention and democratic constraint. The King is the symbolic source of executive authority in Britain, but the elected government exercises that authority in practice. He embodies the state, but he does not run it.
It is possible, of course, that Trump does not fully understand this distinction. The British constitution is famously slippery, and even many British people would struggle to explain precisely how a monarch can be at once central to the state and almost entirely powerless within it.
But perhaps that is precisely the point.
King Charles III may well be living Trump’s dream: to be bathed in the glorious facsimile of absolute power without the rigmarole of having to wield it.
Consider the man behind the orange mask. At 79, Trump has spent decades surrounded by controversy, litigation and criminal allegations. He has fought ferociously to acquire power, reacquire it and cling to it. Yet the presidency he once appeared to treat as the ultimate shield now seems increasingly burdensome. The office demands stamina, discipline, attention and the daily pretence, at the very least, of governance.
For a man who admires power but appears exhausted by responsibility, monarchy must exert a strange fascination.
Across the Atlantic, Charles enjoys something Trump has always seemed to crave: ceremony without scrutiny, reverence without electoral anxiety, grandeur without the daily grind of decision-making. He is driven in gilded carriages, saluted by guards, addressed with ritual deference and treated as the living emblem of a nation. He lives amid palaces, uniforms, crowns and inherited mystique. Yet the actual burden of policy – the compromises, failures, scandals and consequences – falls largely on politicians.
What could be more appealing to Trump than the image of supreme importance without supreme responsibility?
This is not to say that Trump wants to become a literal king. The United States is not about to place a crown on his head, nor would even his most devoted allies be likely to propose such a thing openly. The danger is subtler than that. Trump’s monarchical fantasy, if it exists, may not be about ermine robes and coronation oil. It may be about becoming a permanent figure of political reverence: no longer merely a president, but the sacred object around which a movement, a party and a family apparatus continue to organise themselves.
That is the more plausible third way: not president-for-life, not absolute monarch, but something more informal and therefore harder to challenge. A figurehead who remains above ordinary accountability. A patriarch whose blessing determines the movement’s future. A man protected not by constitutional innovation, but by loyalty, fear, spectacle and the continuing usefulness of his name.
In that sense, Trump’s admiration for Charles may not be as contradictory as it first appears. He may admire Putin for the naked exercise of power. He may admire Orbán for the capture of institutions. He may admire Kim Jong-un for the cult of personality. But in Charles, perhaps, he sees something different: the aesthetic endpoint of power after politics has been stripped away.
A golden crown. A cheering crowd. A life of ceremony. A nation trained to look up.
Or perhaps he just really likes the crown.
