It was in the Capitol where he was finally received as king. With British elegance, friendly lucidity and the discreet charm of an English accent, Charles III went against all of Donald Trump’s positions. And when all the Democratic legislators along with a good part of the Republicans applauded him standing for long minutes, it was the moment in which Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten Windsor stopped being the son of Elizabeth II and definitively became Charles III, monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and sovereign of the fourteen kingdoms that make up the Commonwealth.
In the historic building in Washington that in 2021 was attacked by mobs that caused seven deaths, the vile and arrogant character who denies climate change, hands Ukraine over to Vladimir Putin and conspires against NATO and the European Union, received a lesson in environmental responsibility, defense of the liberal-democratic system, crucial importance of “checks and balances” in the balance of powers, as well as Western values, the urgency of stopping Russia’s aggressive expansionism, the need to respect international law and that there are also those in America who pay the consequences of their links with Jeffrey Epstein, among other things.
“We British have everything in common with the United States, except the language.” As if paraphrasing that lucid irony of Oscar Wilde in The Canterville Ghost, the illustrious visitor dared to say on the North American political scene the reasons why today the governments of London and Washington seem to be speaking different languages.
Many in the United Kingdom and Europe could not believe that it was this insipid king who said before Trump himself everything that the narcissistic and malicious American president hates being told. Some may have even pinched themselves to verify that it wasn’t a dream. And indeed, it wasn’t. The one who questioned the positions of the New York magnate was the timid king whom everyone knows is intelligent and prepared, but few imagined acting beyond protocol and formality.
In Wilde’s famous story, the ghost of Sir Simon Canterville expresses the phlegmatic British aristocracy while the Otis family, arriving from a country without a past, lineage or tradition, represents a modern world that was not afraid of the spectral presence that wanted to frighten them but, on the contrary, had the insolence to laugh and mock it.
Carlos paraphrased in terms of meaning the idea raised by the poet and playwright of the Victorian era, but not to highlight the difference between a lazy lineage and an impertinent modernity like the aforementioned story, but to show the abysmal difference between the geopolitical vision of the current North American leader and that of the other members of NATO, as well as the oceanic distance between the illiberal model that Trump embodies and the liberal democracy defended by the center-left and the European centre-right.
What the British monarch was most interested in highlighting in the United States is the moral duty to help Ukraine in the face of the criminal war imposed on it by Russia. His speech made clear that Trump distances Washington from its European allies, breaking a historical bond that has been successful in military, economic and political terms. He did not say it, but it is deduced that he does so because he identifies ideologically with the serial killer who inhabits the Kremlin, just like the far-right fifth columnists in Russia who try to destroy the EU and the Atlantic alliance from within.
Not only did he receive a slap from the English king. Trump was also trampled by the first North American Pope in history, Leo XIV; Italian post-fascist leader Georgia Meloni; the Spanish leader Pedro Sánchez, strengthened by his confrontations with the head of the White House and with another of the most criticized leaders of the moment: Benjamin Netanyahu. Even Tucker Carlson, the pro-Putin journalist who helped him return to the Oval Office, distanced himself from him, apologizing to Americans who voted for him based on his comments on Fox News.
Even Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, another Kremlin fifth columnist in the European Union, began to distance himself from Trump after the fall of Viktor Orban, the fan of the presidents of the United States and Russia in Budapest. But the slap that hurt him the most was the one that another center-right leader landed on his cheek: the chancellor of Germany.
Frederich Merz put into words the feeling that sweeps the world about the war in the Middle East: the dictatorship of the ayatollahs “is humiliating” the president of the United States who launched himself into the conflict in a clumsy and negligent manner.
Trump would have called all of them “losers” or “horrible people,” as he responded to the CBS journalist who, after the attack on the Hilton, asked him what he thought of the manifesto that the failed assassination wrote calling him a “rapist, pedophile and traitor.” He did not shout or gesture, but he told Norah O’Donnell “you are a disgrace” and a “horrible” person.
It drove him crazy to hear from the CBS reporter the three words with which Cole Allen charged what was supposed to be his epitaph and were fired with exceptional aim at the already deteriorated image of the president.
The Hilton Hotel attacker failed in the two objectives he had set: massacring senior officials and being shot by the hundreds of agents and bodyguards who were in the correspondents’ dinner room. It was to be expected that, before firing shots at the top of the government, a veritable army wearing a coat and tie would fire against him.
Two failures but one unexpected success: the verbal ammunition with which he loaded his “manifesto” hit where they had to hit: the president’s Achilles’ Heel, which constitutes the allegations of sexual assaults he had before entering the White House, his servile functionality to Putin and his dark link with Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump felt the impact on his public image, in an advanced state of deterioration due to his vileness and arbitrariness.
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