We’re just days away from King Charles and Camilla’s state visit to the US. Everyone is holding their breath on both sides of the Atlantic. British people are furious that Charles is giving respectability to an unhinged fascist. American people are furious that an unhinged fascist is sitting in the White House, and that he’s about to host Prince Andrew’s brother for a state visit. It’s all very unseemly and Epstein Class. Well, Tina Brown had a big preview this week on her Substack. She “confirms” something I’ve long suspected, which is that King Charles in particular has a “visceral” hatred of Donald Trump. Some highlights from Brown’s Fresh Hell:

Charles expects to look good compared to Trump: Happily for the king, his state visit to the U.S. next week to celebrate 250 years since the birth of its democracy is occurring at a time when America’s head of state is much madder than King George III. The worse the world gets, the better Charles looks. It’s the triumph of tailoring, the victory of restraint. His arrival on U.S. shores provides an urgent salve to the disintegrated goodwill between Trump and British PM Keir Starmer, who, embarrassingly, is now flailing on the domestic front as well over his bollixed-up vetting of Epstein buddy, Lord Mandelson, for the post of UK ambassador to the U.S.

Visceral hatred: There will be no whiff next week of how “viscerally,” I am told, King Charles privately despises his presidential host. Trump thought he was currying favor when he stomped on the constitutional monarchy’s separation of powers with the observation, “I think he [the king] would have taken a very different stand [on the war in Iran], but he doesn’t do that.” In the unlikely event the president in his speech trashes the British PM as a malingering ally, Charles will look down and fiddle with his gold signet ring, then proceed unfazed with an elegant oration about what was broken in 1776 quickly repaired…hands across the ocean in two world wars…shoring up of democracy at a time of peril…side by side in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. (This last is a must, given Trump’s outrageous recent affront that NATO “stood a little back, a little off the front lines” in Afghanistan, when, in fact, Britain lost 487 troops and the king’s own son Harry served there.)

Charles is going to schedule another visit to the Vatican soon: The king, a royal adviser told me, will be especially pained by Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo. In his decades as Prince of Wales, interfaith understanding was always high on his priority list, to the point that he wanted, as monarch, to be called defender of faith, not the faith. At his coronation, when Charles officially became head of the Church of England, the pews of Westminster Abbey, one guest told me, “were so full of interdenominational representatives, it was an almost comical central casting row of rabbis and imams and monks and archimandrites from the Greek Orthodox Church in stinky cassocks and big beards embracing each other.” As with the king’s immediate invitation asking Zelensky to tea at Sandringham after Trump and Vance roughed up the Ukrainian leader in the Oval Office last year, I fully expect a hastily scheduled trip to the Vatican to appear on the king’s calendar soon.

Charles thinks the state visit will go well for him: The king and queen know they can ace this visit. Whatever the tensions, the palace also sees it as a pleasing opportunity both to blur the frayed transatlantic reality and to big up the monarch at home. It reminds the UK that, for all the recent familial catastrophe with Andrew (whose personal interests of golf, greed, and girls align more closely with those of POTUS than those of the cultured, spiritually evolved King Charles), its head of state is one of the few people in public life who still know how to behave. Queen Elizabeth lived most of her life in an era of media deference, without the threat of image sabotage by viral social media moments captured on phones. In his stoic ability to adhere to first principles amidst the chaos, Charles is the one-man equivalent of the Artemis astronauts.

[From Fresh Hell]

I’ve said before – and I say it again in our Gossip with Celebitchy podcast, coming out this weekend – but I really don’t have a read on how the state visit will go. I agree that the stagecraft of the visit – the state dinner, the parade or whatever it is – will probably go well, and those are the moments when Trump will be on his best behavior. It’s the other moments, like when Charles and Cam go to the Hill, or when they visit Virginia, that I think the situation will go off-script in weird ways. I’m actually glad to hear that Charles has a visceral hatred of Trump though.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.