A King (or Two), a President, and a Troll
Key takeaways
- With dry wit and a sense of irony that was surely lost on the host he so subtly trolled, Charles extolled the virtues of American-style liberal democracy now under threat by America’s own leader.
- There were whoops and cheers and what appeared to be grins of amazement at the King’s cheek.
- Did it matter that Donald Trump did not get the joke?
B. Glasser April 30, 2026Source photograph by Jonathan Ernst / Reuters Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Two hundred and fifty years into the American experiment, it turns out that it takes a King to tell us how to run our Republic.
On Tuesday, His Majesty King Charles III, the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of George III, the British monarch who lost the Revolutionary War to a bunch of impertinent colonists enamored of Enlightenment ideas about the natural rights of man, spoke to the U.S. Congress. With dry wit and a sense of irony that was surely lost on the host he so subtly trolled, Charles extolled the virtues of American-style liberal democracy now under threat by America’s own leader. What does it say about our current politics that polite British-accented clichés about the benefits of the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and the strengths that flow from “vibrant, diverse, and free societies” could end up sounding downright subversive?
The King’s biggest applause line was a tribute to Magna Carta, the thirteenth-century compact between an English monarch and his restive nobles, which, Charles noted, has become a pillar of American constitutional jurisprudence, with the Supreme Court citing it at least a hundred and sixty times in its history, not least to establish “the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” It was a telling sign of our dysfunctional times that members of Congress from both parties, having been increasingly iced out of decision-making by a President claiming unprecedented executive power for himself, immediately rose for a standing ovation. There were whoops and cheers and what appeared to be grins of amazement at the King’s cheek.