“People probably don’t realize this, that the King travels on the advice of his government. So the decision to do the state visit was actually a recommendation of Keir Starmer’s government,” Turner says. “This is not about, necessarily, a relationship between President and King, President and Prime Minister. It’s much broader and deeper than that.”
That helps to explain why, when Trump returned to the White House, Starmer made a point of personally delivering the now-King Charles’ invite for the Trumps to make a second state visit, the first time a President has been given that double honor. Trump, of course, accepted and delighted last year in a second go-around of the trappings of royalty.
When Queen Elizabeth came on that 1991 trip, she spent 13 days visiting D.C., taking in a Baltimore Orioles’ baseball game, hosting a Royal Britannia dinner on the yacht, making a trip to Texas to meet former First Lady Lady Bird Johnson—the widow of the only President she did not meet during her reign—and dropping into Kentucky to check out horse breeding. It was an in-person diplomatic thank-you note to Bush 41 for helping a truly united coalition repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and an attaboy push as The West sought to land the collapse of the Soviet Union without losing any of its nukes.
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