Trump Goes to Windsor

President Trump’s state visit to Great Britain is a moment to mark how, under the glitter and the glamor, the Union Jack is tattered at its edges. The Associated Press reports that “hundreds of people are working to make sure King Charles III puts on the best show possible when he welcomes President Donald Trump for his historic second state visit this week.” The king and the president will dine at Windsor Castle, first built by the Conqueror in 1070.Mr. Trump will be the first world leader to be so fêted by the British for a second time. “We’re buttering up to him” is how a royal historian and consultant to “The Crown,” Robert Lacey, puts it to the AP in respect of Mr. Trump. The president and the monarch will dine at a table, wrought from mahogany, that stretches 164 feet in length. Another historian, Hugo Vickers, predicts that the “tiaras will be out in force. It will all look very splendid.”The AP adds that the Waterloo Table at Windsor “takes five full days to set.” it will be laid with the so-called Grand Service, which comprises more than 4,000 pieces. From Windsor Mr. Trump will proceed to the traditional redoubt of Britain’s prime ministers, Chequers, for a parley with the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer. It was Sir Keir who, at the Oval Office, hand-delivered an invitation to Mr. Trump from King Charles for this visit.Mr. Starmer earned plaudits for that visit in February, but he is widely seen as in a political free fall at home. On Monday the prime minister insisted he would not resign in the wake of the firing of his envoy to America, Ambassador Peter Mandelson, for his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. On Monday Mr. Starmer’s chief strategist, Paul Ovenden, called it quits over salacious comments from 2017 about another Labor pol, Dianne Abbott.Earlier this month Mr. Starmer’s deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, resigned after admitting she failed to pay adequate taxes on the sale of a seaside property. That occasioned another cabinet rejiggering, all against the backdrop of a surge in popularity for the Reform UK party led by Brexiteer Nigel Farage. Mr. Starmer is also facing erosion from his left flank in the form of Your Party, a new faction led by the hard-left Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana.The Telegraph, citing an aide to Mr. Trump, reports that the president knows that Mr. Starmer is “on the ropes” and won’t seek to land any kind of knockout blow. We’d like to see, though, Mr. Trump press the issue of London’s disgraceful stance toward Israel. Mr. Starmer is threatening to recognize a state for the Palestinian Arabs if Israel does not accept orders from 10 Downing on how to wage its war. This is hardly the stuff of Balfour and Churchill.On Monday Britain’s defense ministry announced a ban of Israelis from the Royal College of Defense Studies. That prompted an Israeli official to retort that “Israel’s exclusion is a profoundly dishonourable act of disloyalty to an ally at war.” A word from Mr. Trump would, we’d like to think, be sufficient to reverse. As John Admas told Charles’s ancestor George III, we have in common “the same language, similar religion, and kindred blood.”

Trump Goes to Windsor

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