Their outlooks, too, couldn’t be more different. Charles has long worried about climate change. At the COP28 climate summit in 2023, he said that humans are carrying out “a vast, frightening experiment” on the planet, and that unless the balance is restored, “our survivability will be imperiled.” Mr. Trump told the U.N. last year that “windmills are pathetic,” and called the idea of a climate footprint a “hoax.” Charles was an author of a book called “Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World.” Three years earlier, Mr. Trump wrote one called “Think Big and Kick Ass: In Business and in Life.”
Charles is inclined to worry. In a broadcast marking the 100th anniversary of his mother’s birth this month, he said, “Much about the times we now live in, I suspect, may have troubled her deeply, but I take heart from her belief that goodness will always prevail, and that a brighter dawn is never far from the horizon.” Mr. Trump is confident that force will prevail, even if it means he has to bomb other countries “back to the Stone Ages.”
These men are by no means natural soul mates. Nevertheless, there are signs that a British monarch can still hold some sway in the White House. In an interview with the right-leaning network GBNews in November, Mr. Trump said that when he was a child his mother would tell him to be quiet whenever Queen Elizabeth II was on television. “My mother was a great fan of the queen,” he said. “Any time the queen was on, she said, ‘Excuse me, don’t talk. We have to listen to the queen.’ ” He has described these moments as formative, and said they left him with a lifelong respect for the royal family.
Mr. Trump has praised Elizabeth II’s son — only last week he told the BBC that Charles is both “a fantastic man” and “a great man.” And after Mr. Trump criticized the British armed forces at Davos in January — for, against all evidence, “having stayed a little back, a little off the front line” in Afghanistan — Charles, who is the head of the British armed forces, was widely reported to have sent a correction to the White House. Around the same time, in a rare course correction, the president released a statement praising “the great and very brave soldiers of the United Kingdom.”
Whether from nerves or self-aggrandizement, even confident, successful people presented to royalty often spout an unstoppable stream of gibberish. Terry Wogan, a veteran broadcaster, called it “the Royal Effect.” Elizabeth II once asked President Nixon’s ambassador to Britain, Walter Annenberg, where he and his wife were living. His verbose reply, recorded on camera, was: “We’re in the Embassy residence, subject, of course, to some of the discomfiture as a result of the needs for elements of refurbishing and rehabilitation.” The queen maintained a fixed smile throughout. It was all part of her training.
