Bad news? I think they’ve pumped so many drugs into Donald Trump, he now looks somewhat healthier than King Charles. I would feel bad about saying that, except I remember Charles’s courtiers running around, briefing the press about Joe Biden’s age several years ago. Charles was pissed that President Biden didn’t go to the coronation, remember that? So Charles made it all about Biden’s age and health. Now Charles has been receiving cancer treatments for nineteen months and his mealy pallor makes Trump look hale and hearty.

Of course, there are plenty of other parts to this state visit which are pretty disgusting. Trump is being feted and celebrated like a conquering king. He’s a pathetic authoritarian hellbent on destroying NATO, the European Union and all postwar societal, cultural and economic advancements. I don’t exactly blame Charles and the royals for this – this was decided by Downing Street and Keir Starmer’s government, to roll out the red carpet this way for Trump. But that didn’t stop Tom Sykes from going OFF on his Royalist Substack, in a piece called “Britain Grovels Before Trump, Shamefully Enabling This Sick, Destructive Man.” An excerpt:

The United Kingdom shamelessly prostrated itself at the feet of Donald Trump on Wednesday morning, throwing a welcoming party for his state visit at Windsor so lavish it looked less like diplomacy than ritual self-humiliation. No foreign leader has ever been greeted with this degree of ceremonial excess. The choreography was on the scale of Elizabeth II’s funeral, yet this was not grief but a spectacle, a genuflection staged for a man many Britons see as a wrecking ball aimed at the very post-war settlement the country once helped design.

To those watching with clear eyes, it was nauseating. There was at least a grim honesty in the absurdity. Trump demands spectacle, and Britain, desperate to please, delivers. He wants to be king; Britain obliges.

But in obliging, the U.K. reveals something darker about itself: that to keep America close, it will debase itself utterly, strip its traditions for parts, and hire out its monarch like a sex worker to soothe the vanity of a man who insists on being treated as sovereign.

Royal ceremony is theatre, but this was a theatre that revealed far more than a sovereign nation should about its craven need to please a foreign leader who has done nothing to help Britain and plenty to harm it.

[From The Royalist Substack]

Yeah, I agree with all of that. It’s pathetic on both sides – Trump is a global embarrassment, and America will likely never recover from any of this. But I don’t hold it against the UK for doing what they can to stay on Trump’s good side. In fact, I think Starmer and many other European leaders have figured out their own ways to manipulate Trump and/or work around him. This is part of how they do that – they play to his vanity, they treat him like the most delicate and superficial strongman ever, because that’s exactly what he is.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.