During the pandemic, someone shared a meme of President Donald Trump in his gilded New York apartment. Near him, first lady Melania Trump draped herself over a piano, while their son, Baron Trump, sat astride a stuffed tiger. The image was accompanied by a question: “If Trump got Covid and lost his sense of taste, how could you tell?”
It was a wittier jab than most, for the president has an excessive love of gilt. As with his massive flags flying on the White House lawn, his attitude is that if something is good, more of it is better.
Gold accents recently applied by Trump glitter all over the Oval Office and show that the president doesn’t tend toward dignified restraint, and doesn’t indeed do anything by halves.
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So much, so obvious — and so helpful to the British government in preparing for Trump’s unprecedented second state visit to the United Kingdom. It is giving him as much gold-plated grandeur, pomp, circumstance, and ceremony as possible, as only the British know how.
Along with his strong Anglophilia, the president inherited a love of the monarchy from his Scottish mother, and this presents U.K. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer with a gift of an opportunity, on a silver platter, to flatter the president. In addition to practical and beneficial deals on nuclear power, artificial intelligence, and other technology to be finalized at their summit on Thursday, the prime minister wants to smooth away American scowls at his suppression of free speech and his degenerate reward of terrorism via recognition of a Palestinian state.
Starmer’s government directed King Charles III to invite Trump, which is how things work in a constitutional monarchy, and then delivered the handwritten royal billet doux during his last visit to the Oval Office. This drew a delighted “wow” from the president.
The king is hosting Trump at Windsor Castle, a massive, grey, medieval, hilltop pile that is the monarch’s preeminent royal residence outside London. Household guards’ regiments — infantry in brilliant red tunics and bearskins, and cavalry in plumes and cuirasses — will parade before the president. There will be cannon fire, salutes, and a military flyover. There will be medals, white ties, black swallow coattails, and the grandest of gilded state banquets.
The president will thus get an enormous dollop of Anglo ceremonial — that’s how the British do their love-bombing — which Starmer and the king hope and expect will be reciprocated with a floodtide of Trumpian goodwill.
All this raises the question of whether Trump loves monarchy so much that he wants to be a king. It is interesting to consider the Democrats’ short-lived and fatuous message along these lines while Trump rubs shoulders with royalty. Is there any connection between Trump’s taste for the trappings of authority, his expectation that underlings will fawn on him, and his supposed dislike of democracy and threat to it?
Blue party leaders dropped this suggestion swiftly when polling showed the public was not buying it, although a few bitter clingers in the base naturally continued for some months to parrot the line that had been fed to them.
But critics who depict everything Trump does as a threat to democracy — their taste for garish rhetoric is comparable or worse than his — deliberately confuse two connected but different things.
Yes, Trump is indeed neither steeped nor interested in the forms of constitutional republican government. As a lifelong business executive, he is frustrated by the repeatedly established fact that he cannot just order something to be done and it is so. But it is a big leap from there to suggest, as so many do, that he is dismantling American democracy. His dislike of and irritation with proper procedures that thwart him does not, to a reasonable and unbiased judge, merge into a plan to wreck our republic and make the last election literally the last election.
Trump has issued more executive orders than any president before, but many of them are part of a well-conceived plan to prod and divine the proper boundaries of executive authority. The orders are often pitched modestly, as with the recent flag-burning order to take whatever action is allowed by law. When it is uncertain what the law does and does not allow, Trump wants to create test cases that, in many cases, will roll back incursions on executive authority by unelected bureaucrats.
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He is not acting like a king, by which even in this age of circumscribed constitutional monarchs, people think of as an absolute ruler. He is trying to ensure that he gets as much as possible of his democratically approved agenda done and does not preemptively stymie himself by assuming constitutional barriers are properly erected where the deep state has been throwing them up for the past several generations.
Trump’s modus operandi is not to many people’s taste. It is hardly to mine. But he and his voters are not interested in allowing or facilitating continued genteel decline. It’s to his credit that he is ready to be called crass if that’s the price of restoring the nation. Or, as former President Barack Obama put it, of getting America out of the ditch where the other side drove it off the road.