King Charles III used a historic address to the U.S. Congress to offer a subtle but stinging rebuke of President Donald Trump’s often-monarchical ambitions as he hailed the separation of powers that replaced the British monarchy in the former colonies all those years ago.
Speaking to a rare joint meeting of Congress on the second day of his and Queen Camilla’s state visit to Washington, the King had members of the American legislature on their feet, clapping and cheering in response to his description of the American constitutional system as part of a “great inheritance” passed down from the United Kingdom to the United States.
The King’s speech to members of the House and Senate came just hours after he’d met with Trump at the White House behind closed doors, with the White House’s social media team using the occasion to promote Trump as an American “King” in a post on X.
But Charles, who stood in the same spot in the House chamber from which his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, had spoken 35 years earlier, did not mention the name of the 47th president, nor did he directly address any American political controversies on account of the restrictions placed on him by his constitutional role in the British government.
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Instead, he made repeated references to the shared history and heritage from which the government in Washington borrowed from that which predated it in London.
At one point, he wryly noted that the dispute which led to the American rebellion against the Crown, over “taxation without representation,” sprung from a “shared democratic value” between both the U.S. and U.K. while praising the “bold and imaginative rebels” who threw off what they called the ‘absolute Tyranny” of his great-great-great-great-great grandfather for having “carried forward” principles of the British enlightenment that themselves drew from the “deeper history” of English common law and the Magna Carta.
As he noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has cited that latter document over 160 times as “the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances,” the House chamber erupted into applause.
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