Between dinner with King Charles, flirting with Princess Kate, and Melania holding his hand, it is hard to decide which part of the state visit Trump relished most. This was the crème de la crème of vacations for Trump, the real-life Disneyland experience – a chance to cosplay as king. He did not spend time in London. He avoided Downing Street. Like any good tourist, he headed for the chintzy heart of Britain’s bygone power. To Windsor, with an “extra large” guard of honour waiting for him.
The brochure effectively said this second state visit was a very special trip for a very special boy. It was as if, in the words of Jon Stewart, Trump had become a Make-a-Wish kid. You got the sense everyone just wanted him to have a good time. Trump’s face bobbed in the window of the ornate royal carriage as it left Windsor Castle before eventually arriving back at… Windsor Castle, like he was on some monarchical merry-go-round. Melania was forced to look at a doll’s house with Camilla – hopefully not too much of a chilling reminder of her strange life in various overworked Trump properties in Florida and New York.
At one point, as Charles showed him royal artefacts, Trump asked the reporters around him: “Are you having a good time?” The president certainly was. He looked genuinely delighted as parachutists flew down from the clouds trailing a mammoth American flag. That said, I couldn’t work out why Norfolk chicken was served at the state banquet when Hereford steak was the obvious choice. Trump’s not known for eating Chick-fil-A, is he.
Poultry to one side, the visit ended gaffe-free. Trump would not let Peter Mandelson’s sacking intrude on his autumn getaway. “I don’t know him, actually,” he said when the press pried. That’s quite the epitaph for the old ambassador and is surely one of Trump’s most daring and creative inversions of the truth yet. No 10 must be kicking themselves right now. Why didn’t Keir just say he didn’t know Mandelson? One of Tony’s old mates, right? Oh, the trouble that could’ve been avoided.
The trip was humiliating, it goes without saying. But for whom? Starmer, obviously. The British people, too. Does that matter? Perhaps this is just a matter of national pride. The old world has always blushed at the thought of becoming a museum for successive Daisy Millers to peruse. Two recent Netflix shows (My Oxford Year and Too Much) suggest that in the American imagination Britain is a fantasyland for young women with a lust for plummy accented men. The dream of mantis-like acquisition of British males has replaced more mundane desires, like visiting Harrod’s. The ancestral homeland becomes a canvas on which American desires are projected.
Something similar happens in politics. Just as an aristocrat might turn their pile into a wedding venue for wealthy New Yorkers, Starmer is hawking Windsor Castle to the highest bidder in order to rustle up some fiscal headroom for his embattled chancellor.
We are told patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, but anyone who is not a masochist must ask whether the humiliation we witnessed this week is worth the price of admission. The trade is this: British independence served with a cool glass of Pol Roger, Extra Cuvée de Réserve, 1998 in return for a big technology deal. Details on what’s been agreed are pretty sparse. American companies are said to plan to invest £150bn in the UK, but the BBC reports £90bn of that will come from the asset manager Blackstone, and where that money will be spent is so far undecided. Microsoft will put forward £31bn and American and British scientists will work together on quantum computing, Artificial Intelligence and nuclear energy. The government is pitching the deal as a turning point in the country’s hitherto muddled pursuit of economic growth.
But Nick Clegg, a man who you might expect to be giddy about technological investment, sounded a gloomier note when he reminded the Brits that foreign investment does not change the UK’s fundamental problem that we don’t have the power to build these industries ourselves. “Not only do we import all their technology, we export all our good people and good ideas as well,” he told the BBC. The solution was for the UK to learn to “stand more on our own two feet”, and not “cling on to Uncle Sam’s coattails”. In 2025, British politicians don’t think we have a choice. The government’s strategy remains the same regardless of which party nominally runs the country. Uncle Sam’s coattails are right where our politicians want to hide.
Cast your eye down the seating plan for Wednesday’s state banquet and you’ll find very few British tech titans. The Governor of the Bank of England, yes. The Olympian Katherine Grainger. The King’s private secretary Clive Alderton. The chair of the National Grid. But no British Silicon Valley. Part of the reason is the government allows Americans to buy out British firms before they can ever enter the top league of companies. It’s a century-old story: auctioning our assets in order to fund our day-to-day spending. Look at Lend-Lease, North Sea oil, council housing, ARM and Admiralty Arch. At the banquet, Demis Hassabis, who co-founded the once-British success story DeepMind, was sitting next to David Sacks, the White House AI chief. Hassabis was bought out by Google in 2014. One of the greatest minds Britain has produced in the last half century or so is already a salaried employee for a yankee tech company.
Perhaps that’s why the trip looked so parochial from the imperial capital. There were six stories on Thursday’s New York Times frontpage, none of which were about the state visit. The trip was relegated to a photo with the painfully condescending caption: “Pomp and pageantry demonstrated Britain’s eagerness to appeal to President Trump”. Similar captions might have said “Trump visits a medium-sized rock in the North Atlantic” or perhaps, given how much hardware the US stores on our island, “American missile base inspected by the Dear Leader.” If our deference was reciprocated by respect from our American cousins, this visit might have prompted different headlines.
The reality on the ground in Washington is that Charlie Kirk’s murder remains the only story in town. The scenes in London and DC this week could not have been more different. Trump in white tie doting over Princess Catharine. JD Vance, meanwhile, broadcasting wild-eyed calls for the Maga movement to don its armour in battle against the radical left. The president’s royal fetish seemed anachronistic in comparison. He fawned over chandeliers, while his heir apparent forged a new Maga myth.
The motifs of Atlantic diplomacy since January have been humiliation, flattery and a disjunction between Maga’s view of Britain as a third world hellhole and Trump’s adoration for glittery royal pomp. And here is one reason why the humiliation might not be worth it: it will only pay as long as Trump is in office. His successors won’t fall for a carriage ride to nowhere.
[Further reading: Jeffrey Epstein haunts Donald Trump’s state visit]
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