This post was originally published on Laughing Leads to Crying, a Substack newsletter by California journalist Josh Gohlke. In May, all new paid subscribers to Golden State will receive a complementary paid subscription to LLC as well, which means you can support two independent publications for the price of one.
Two heads of state met amid much fuss in Washington this week. One is an instinctively antidemocratic, white supremacist, would-be autocrat. And the other is the king of England.
While genuine joy seems largely alien to Donald Trump, he appears closest to moments of true contentment during his gratuitously frequent encounters with the British royals. That is probably because his royalist impulses are even more unabashed than theirs.
The visit did, after all, unfold in the glowering shadow of the revelation that the administration is plotting to paste the president’s godforsaken face on U.S. passports, almost as if it’s determined to ruin your next vacation. This defacement would join his equally aberrant and un-American serial vandalism of coins, bills, national park passes, government programs and federal buildings with his already ubiquitous name and likeness.
Even the English monarchs, who are fully expected to slap their mugs on currency and more, don’t stare out at their subjects from their travel documents. Indeed, there’s no apparent precedent for branding a passport with the ruler’s face in America or any other country.
Perhaps that’s why King Charles, for all his practiced bonhomie with the president, sounded so ill at ease with Trump’s reassertion of the kind of reign of which Americans once unburdened ourselves at great cost. Charles’s remarks before Congress and the president referred pointedly (by British standards) to the value of America’s alliances with Britain and Europe, “unyielding” defense of Ukraine, environmental responsibility, and democratic checks and balances, none of which Trump has any consistent appreciation for.
To translate the queen’s English into Queens English, this was a real king’s way of saying, “Hey, cut it out with the king crap, will ya?” Like everything else he associates himself with, Trump is giving monarchy a bad name.
The president’s royal aspirations aren’t merely cosmetic. Consider his latest laughable attempt to punish Jim Comey for challenging the limitlessness of his power. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s prosecution of the former FBI director for a silly anti-Trump social media message spelled out in seashells is reminiscent of the lèse-majesté laws of old England and modern monarchies such as Thailand, where it’s illegal to criticize the king.
Trump doesn’t have a Star Chamber, the medieval kangaroo court that enforced England’s lèse-majesté laws by ordering body parts chopped off those who dared disparage the crown. But he has the next best thing in the Supreme Court, which just boosted his flagging effort to protect himself from the will of the commoners through extreme gerrymandering.
The royal family’s ostracism of one of its own over the Epstein revelations, meanwhile, almost looks principled next to the Trump administration’s endless cover-up. It’s one more reason Charles is getting political heat for hanging out with our unaccountable sovereign rather than the other way around.
In his petulant recent 60 Minutes appearance, Trump angrily denied accusations that he is acting like a king, noting that he “wouldn’t be dealing with” his interviewer, Norah O’Donnell, if he were. It was an inadvertently revealing argument given that his demeanor showed he would vastly prefer not to be dealing with O’Donnell or any other unfettered journalist — hence his and his allies relentless efforts to force her employer and other media organizations to stop asking cheeky questions and start bowing before the throne.
The actual, understated title given to Trump’s office — not king or highness or excellency but simply Mr. President — reflects the founders’ revulsion at the prospect of imbuing the executive of their new democracy with anything resembling the unchecked power of the monarch of whom they had just rid themselves. I don’t think they would have believed that a king would one day attempt to explain the difference to a president.
