King Charles III used a historic address to the U.S. Congress to offer a subtle but stinging rebuke of President Donald Trump’s often-monarchical ambitions as he hailed the separation of powers that replaced the British monarchy in the former colonies all those years ago.
Speaking to a rare joint meeting of Congress on the second day of his and Queen Camilla’s state visit to Washington, the King had members of the American legislature on their feet, clapping and cheering in response to his description of the American constitutional system as part of a “great inheritance” passed down from the United Kingdom to the United States.
The King’s speech to members of the House and Senate came just hours after he’d met with Trump at the White House behind closed doors, with the White House’s social media team using the occasion to promote Trump as an American “King” in a post on X.
But Charles, who stood in the same spot in the House chamber from which his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, had spoken 35 years earlier, did not mention the name of the 47th president, nor did he directly address any American political controversies on account of the restrictions placed on him by his constitutional role in the British government.
Instead, he made repeated references to the shared history and heritage from which the government in Washington borrowed from that which predated it in London.
At one point, he wryly noted that the dispute which led to the American rebellion against the Crown, over “taxation without representation,” sprung from a “shared democratic value” between both the U.S. and U.K. while praising the “bold and imaginative rebels” who threw off what they called the ‘absolute Tyranny” of his great-great-great-great-great grandfather for having “carried forward” principles of the British enlightenment that themselves drew from the “deeper history” of English common law and the Magna Carta.
And as he noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has cited that latter document over 160 times as “the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances,” the House chamber erupted into applause.
Continuing, the King embarked on a defense of democratic values in the form of representative democracy as practiced in the U.S. Capitol, where “ spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s Founders is present in every session and every vote cast.”
“Not by the will of one, but by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States. In both of our countries, it is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength,” he said.
Charles’ visit to the American capital, which reciprocates a state visit to London by Trump last year, comes as the American president has repeatedly bashed the British government and other NATO governments for not being sufficiently supportive of the war he launched against Iran at the end of February, calling the 32-member defensive alliance a “paper tiger” and threatening to withdraw America from the mutual defense pact.
As he spoke before Congress, he praised the United States as “the heart” of the alliance as he boasted of a “transformation of British defense” in the form of what he called “the biggest sustained increase in defense spending since the Cold War.
“From the depths of the Atlantic to the disastrously melting ice-caps of the Arctic, the commitment and expertise of the United States Armed Forces and its allies lie at the heart of NATO, pledged to each other’s defense, protecting our citizens and interests, keeping North Americans and Europeans safe from our common adversaries,” he said.
He added that American and British “defense, intelligence and security ties” have been “hardwired together through relationships measured not in years but in decades.”
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