The planning for the royal visit to Washington, in celebration of America’s semiquincentennial, was under way long before the British Embassy even knew who would win the 2024 Presidential election. Last week, in anticipation of His Majesty’s arrival, maintenance crews adorned lampposts near the White House with the Union Jack—except they actually got it wrong, and hung the Australian flag. The error, as the Transportation Secretary’s office put it, was soon rectified. When King Charles and Queen Camilla landed on Monday, they were received by President Donald Trump and the First Lady in the West Wing for tea and for a tour of the White House’s new beehives; a bee landed on Trump’s outstretched palm, which he displayed for the royal couple and Melania.

The next morning, as part of Charles’s welcome ceremony, American military units and bands marched through rain on the South Lawn. Occasional banging and clanging from Trump’s ballroom-construction project was audible whenever the music stopped; a crane hovered above, and the U.K. press pool joked that its operators had the best view. (Charles gently referred to the gaping hole where the East Wing once stood as Trump’s “readjustment.”)

“What a beautiful, British day this is,” Trump said, looking out at the drizzle from a podium. “And it really is.” I stood under press risers to keep dry. “Close your umbrellas,” attendees shouted from farther back on the lawn. “We can’t see!” Cabinet secretaries and other senior officials arrived and wiped off their damp seats with napkins. For his review of the troops and bands, Trump moved at a fast clip with a marine guard; he left Charles trailing slightly behind, trying to keep up. Camilla and Melania sat together in white outfits, watching their husbands. Ceremonial cannonballs were fired, and when I looked back toward the Jefferson Memorial, thick smoke billowed through the wet air. Trump gestured to a tree that Queen Elizabeth II had given the U.S. on a visit decades ago. “It was a young and beautiful tree, and look at it now,” he said. “It’s tripled in size and tripled in strength, very much as our nations have.” The crane swung above the tree as he was talking.

The themes of “reconciliation and renewal” had been heavily teased in advance of the visit; the “special relationship” was in free fall. “With who?” Trump said when asked about it last week. A British journalist described witnessing “the strange, ongoing U.K.-U.S. meltdown.” It wasn’t just that Britain’s most recent U.S. Ambassador, Peter Mandelson, had been recalled amid new revelations regarding his close ties to Jeffrey Epstein; there was talk that Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, would resign over the scandal. And Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the King’s younger brother, had been arrested under suspicion of passing confidential briefings to Epstein while serving as a U.K. trade envoy. (He and Mandelson have both denied wrongdoing.) Meanwhile, Starmer’s lack of enthusiasm for Trump’s war with Iran has led the President to refer to him as Neville Chamberlain. Christian Turner, Mandelson’s replacement, had said that America’s true special relationship is with “probably Israel.” (The remarks, made earlier this year to a group of U.K. students, were leaked the week of the visit and splashed across the front page of the Financial Times the day that Trump received Charles.)

In an interview with Sky News, Trump denigrated Starmer, whose policies he characterized as “insane”; his political future, he said, depended on cracking down on immigration. (“They’re destroying your country.”) Charles, meanwhile, was a “great gentleman.” The King is the embodiment of the England that the President still likes: Windsor Castle, glossy magazine covers of Princess Diana. As Freddie Hayward, of The New Statesman, put it, “Instead of sending their hapless Prime Minister, they would work with the grain of Americans’ love for our royals.” He went on, “One official compared it to the King’s Speech in Parliament, where the monarch becomes the mouthpiece for the government.”

There is always glee in Washington in advance of royal visits. When Charles came in 1985, as a prince, the Post ran a hundred-and-sixteen-page supplement from the British Tourist Authority. This time, the most sought-after invitation was for a garden tea at the British Embassy, where members of Trump’s Cabinet joined the receiving line for the King. “I wasn’t invited, so my republicanism is hardening,” a British journalist told me. “The visit seems far more significant to Washington than it does to Westminster, where the press is more fixated on using the previous U.S. Ambassador to bring down the Prime Minister than on what the current U.S. Ambassador is doing with the King.” In D.C., he continued, “People here have switched from ‘No Kings’ to ‘O.K., one king, as long as he’s not ours.’ ”

And Trump, of course, enjoys royal cosplay. He has posted memes of himself as a monarch; this weekend, after an apparent assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, he told a CBS anchor, “If I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.” Just before the White House welcome ceremony, Trump responded to an article in the Daily Mail which suggested he might be a distant cousin of the King’s. “Wow, that’s nice,” the President wrote on Truth Social. “I’ve always wanted to live in Buckingham Palace!”

The speech on the South Lawn went beyond the usual pomp and circumstance. “For nearly two centuries before the Revolution, this land was settled and forged by men, women, who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British,” Trump said. “Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage, their hearts beat with an English faith.” This heritage, he said, was the foundation of liberty. “In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea. But the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776.”

A senior Administration official reacting to the speech told me that “republican ideas and Anglo-Saxon heritage are inextricable.” Last year, when Starmer said that England risked becoming an “island of strangers” owing to migration, he quickly apologized for his phrasing, which seemed to echo Enoch Powell’s notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech: “For reasons which they could not comprehend . . . they found themselves made strangers in their own country.” Many on the right in both countries seemed glad that Trump was willing to affirm what Starmer skirted around. Another reporter told me that Steve Bannon had sent him a text after the speech: “blood and soil—epic.”

A few hours later, the King travelled to the Capitol to give a joint address to Congress. When I arrived on the Hill, as Charles and House Speaker Mike Johnson were taking a ceremonial walk through Statuary Hall, my phone buzzed with the news that the Justice Department was again indicting James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, this time for an Instagram post in which he arranged seashells in a manner that allegedly threatened the President’s life.

Watching the House chamber from the viewing gallery before the speech was like peering into a garden party from above. Near me, in the audience, one man was dressed as George Washington. While Vice-President J. D. Vance sent the Congressional Escort Committee out to fetch the King, we got a news alert that the Federal Communications Commission was reviewing ABC’s broadcasting licenses. (Days before the W.H.C.A. dinner incident, the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel had joked that Melania had “a glow like an expectant widow.”) Across the Mall, Trump was posting on Truth Social that Germany was a failing nation. The King entered the chamber to a long standing ovation.

Applause during a joint session is usually an awkward and partisan art; at the recent State of the Union, Vance and Johnson stood like professional opera clappers behind the President as Democrats in the audience shook their heads. This was simpler. Nearly all the members stood to cheer for Charles’s lines about the Founding Fathers—“bold and imaginative rebels with a cause”—and the Magna Carta, which decreed that “the executive branch be subject to checks and balances.” When Trump communicates with Congress, it often takes the form of an all-caps threat; for Charles, Congress was a “citadel of democracy.” He spoke of shared values, and in support of Ukraine, NATO, and environmental preservation; most of the chamber applauded for all of these, too. (There were still exceptions; for example, Lauren Boebert, the congresswoman from Colorado, threw her hands up in annoyance at the mention of Ukraine.)

“I think we’re all Anglophiles,” Daniel Boorstin, the Librarian of Congress, had noted during a previous royal visit. It wasn’t clear how many members would agree today, but they did really like the King. A collective murmur of affirmation echoed after Charles said that America’s words “carry meaning.” A Democratic congressman texted me, “He spoke of our values and our common history and all those good things. I wish Trump could think the same way.” He went on, “I really like the response Congress gave him on NATO and Ukraine and science and environment.” A political editor at a British outlet was more cynical. Charles, he told me, had used “woke diversity language in order to win over ‘No Kings’ Democrats.” Twenty minutes later, the Senate reconvened to take up Tim Kaine’s war-powers resolution to block the President from taking military action in Cuba without first seeking congressional authorization. In the House, members were poised to vote on several contentious bills, including on the legality of warrantless surveillance and on funding the Department of Homeland Security, which has been shut down since mid-February. I walked a few blocks from the Capitol to a “red coats and rosé” party for the U.S. editor of the Sun, whose birthday coincided with the King’s visit. Radiohead played from the speakers and sausage rolls were passed out. Many wore gold crowns as they clinked glasses: “God save the King.” But the British host told me that it was Trump’s speech that made people “well up with national pride.” The contrast with the King, who talked about “values, rather than heritage, couldn’t have been more stark.”

At the White House, a state dinner had begun. “He got the Democrats to stand,” Trump said, of Charles’s speech in Congress. “I’ve never been able to do that.” Charles toasted Trump’s ballroom. “I am sorry to say that we British, of course, made our own attempt at real-estate redevelopment of the White House in 1814,” he said, referring to when they set it on fire. “The story of Britain and America,” he said, “is one of reconciliation.” ♦