Dorothy

Royal tea The king and queen landed at Joint Base Andrews on April 27, changed at Blair House into something less comfortable, then joined the president and first lady for a walk in the White House Garden. The king is a keen apiarist and supplements his income by selling honey from his Cornish estates under his Duchy Organic brand, and the queen keeps her own bees as well as her own house. They appreciated the beehive shaped like a miniature White House that the first lady has installed on the South Lawn in a bid to make the White House kitchens as self-sufficient in honey as the nation is in energy.

"I was on my way to hear an actual King speak," Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., said in a statement after Charles’ address. "Funny how the ‘No Kings’ crowd is nowhere to be found. Guess the outrage depends on who’s talking?"

“The party chanting ‘no kings’ was clamoring to stand in ovation of a real King,” one user wrote.

Trump has repeatedly denied allegations of him being a king. During an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” days before the royal visit, Trump told reporter Norah O’Donnell, “I’m not a king. What I am, if I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.”

The so-called “special relationship” between Britain and the United States has never seemed more tenuous. At times, it looks like the US-UK alliance is a geopolitical version of a slowly disintegrating celebrity relationship where neither side wants to admit it’s actually over, so someone has to do a crazy thing like cheating in the most high-profile manner possible to wrap things up. Like Klay Thompson (allegedly) stepping out on Megan Thee Stallion, America has been making goo-goo eyes at Israel for the last year, and King Charles is starting to get jealous.

A decade ago Charles’s address to Congress would have seemed boilerplate in its support for the Nato alliance and a western ally’s war against Russian aggression. His remark that Magna Carta has been cited in at least 160 supreme court cases since 1789, “not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances”, would have been one for the history nerds.

Charles scored another hit with his gift – a brass bell from the HMS Trump, a British submarine that served in the second world war. It was not quite a royal orb, but close, and the president was obviously bedazzled. So bedazzled that he tried to enlist the support of the King by asserting (without evidence) that Charles agrees with him that Iran should never have nuclear weapons. But that reckless comment, like so many presidential statements in the last month, simply floated into the ether after persuading no one.

But he did so gracefully, quoting the Declaration’s egalitarian phrases with far more assurance than Trump ever has. Daringly, he slipped in statements that might even be perceived as critiques, if not so artfully tucked into otherwise glowing paragraphs about the relationship. The king asserted his respect for the limits on the executive that fortify democracy in both countries (something that speaker Mike Johnson, seated behind the King, seems loath to articulate). And he slipped in several stirring environmental thoughts, including a paean to “nature” (an important word in the Declaration), and a strong adverb – “disastrously” – to describe the melting icecaps in the Arctic.

Buckingham Palace appeared relaxed about Trump’s Iran comment, noting that “the king is naturally mindful of his government’s longstanding and well-known position on the prevention of nuclear proliferation.”

Asked on Wednesday morning what he would say if they were to spend time together, Mamdani said he would probably encourage the king to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond, one of the Tower of London’s crown jewels that was taken from a 10-year-old maharajah in India whose kingdom was seized by the British.

Nor did they grapple with modern scandals ranging from the treatment of Diana, Princess of Wales and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex to the recent arrest of Charles’s brother, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, over his connection to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Appeals for King Charles and Queen Camilla to meet survivors of Epstein’s abuse went unheeded.

UK flag error sparks reaction during King Charles Arlington visit  USA Today