The Quiet Triumph of King Charles III

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

The Quiet Triumph of King Charles III

 

Sept. 17, 2025, 1:00 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/opinion/king-charles-trump-britain-visit.html

By Tina Brown

Ms. Brown is the author of “The Palace Papers” and “The Diana Chronicles.” She writes a weekly newsletter, Fresh Hell.

 

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.

 

But Mr. Trump’s Windsor welcome will be a boost to royal relevance, too, a showcase for the deft international statesmanship of Charles, who will play a pivotal diplomatic — not merely ceremonial — role in the president’s second visit.

 

For years, critics wondered how the opinionated, emotional Charles, obsessed with such then-unrelatable issues as bone-dry climate change, hokey homeopathy and the fuddy-duddy preservation of heritage crafts, could ever attain the royal mystique of his mother. Elizabeth was a sphinx for 70 years, while we know absolutely everything about Charles, from his sub rosa sex life with Camilla during the eons when she was his mistress to the miserable falling-out with his younger son, Prince Harry. As the British public waits for Prince William to walk through destiny’s door, the most that was expected from the transitional reign of his septuagenarian father was, in Churchill’s phrase, to just “keep buggering on.”

 

And yet, Charles’s first few years as monarch have been something of a quiet triumph. Seasoned by countless foreign tours, marinated in his constitutional role through years of practice and now magically aligned with so much of modern citizenry’s concerns (his decades-long campaign against pesticides and food dyes, by the way, now sounds like the sane bit of MAHA), Charles may be the last man standing who can exude global gravitas in the dumpster fire of our digitally dominated world.

 

It was he who was able to assuage some of the hurt feelings of Brexit by buttering up the Bundestag in fluent German and then warmly addressing the French Senate in perfect French. He effectively signaled official British disgust with Mr. Trump’s sneers about Canada as the 51st U.S. state with a swift trip to open Canada’s Parliament at the invitation of Mark Carney, the prime minister. His celebrated display of human decency inviting the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to tea at his private home, Sandringham, right after Mr. Zelensky’s shameful pummeling in the Oval Office, was a gesture that Elizabeth, with her strict adherence to diplomatic diaries, would never have considered. In the social media age, when the mask of monarchy is no longer possible or desirable, Charles is redefining how we expect a sovereign to behave.

 

It is all the more tragic that his diagnosis of an undisclosed cancer may make his reign a race against time, which added poignancy to his long-postponed reunion with his estranged son Harry last week. Charles knows that in these times of ugly political discord, a fractured royal family is a bad look. But it was also the fulfillment of paternal longing. It’s no secret that Charles desperately misses his prodigal son who, in earlier days, was always the fun, ebullient scamp compared with the haughtier, more Hanoverian William. It’s understandably enraging for William to see his treacherous younger brother, who spent the last five years trashing his family on TV and promoting a back-stabbing, best-selling book, bounding around the British charity circuit, doing a well-received side-dash to Ukraine and upstaging the photo ops of William’s own diligent engagements.

 

But Charles, I am told, is tiring of his elder son’s self-righteous intractability in the family feud, and wants to re-embrace Harry — if only he can keep his mouth shut. Harry’s subsequent interview with The Guardian, in which the imperturbably cocky prince said, “My conscience is clear,” suggests to his haters the futility of expecting Harry Hotspur to play the old royal game.

 

Here in America, we are obsessed with the process and drama of presidential politics, the burden of office, the daily colonoscopy of the White House press corps and the intolerable intrusions into our leaders’ private lives. Former First Ladies moan about the pressures they endure during hellish years in the White House bubble. But only the people born or married into the institution of monarchy know the real meaning of life in a cage, defined by duty, service and unceasing public scrutiny with no exit except death or flight. It’s more akin to taking holy orders than living a grand, red-carpet life waited on by obsequious servants — something Harry’s wife, Meghan, never understood.

 

Is there any chance that Mr. Trump will leave the royals’ Windsor home with greater insight into the futility of posing as a fake king? Windsor Castle has survived for 1,000 years, and so has the British monarchy. As Mr. Fry pondered to me, “One hopes that Trump will at least subliminally read the message of the castle. That true power doesn’t show off. That luster is a better look than bling.” Unfortunately, it’s more likely that Mr. Trump will order up some suits of armor and a job lot of halberds for America’s 250th anniversary parade.

 

Perhaps the real deliverable from Trump’s state visit is a reaffirmation of Britain’s constitutional self-confidence. The sovereign will always stand as an image of stability, above inescapable partisan conflict. It’s soothing to reflect that a British monarch will be entertaining American presidents long after Mr. Trump has become a husk of history.