King Charles III is planning a state visit to Washington DC next month. He is rumored to be staying at the White House, attending a state dinner and possibly addressing a joint meeting of Congress.
The last royal to address Congress was Charles’s mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II speaking to a full chamber in May 1991, during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, around three months after the end of Operation Desert Storm. Britain contributed more than 50,000 troops to Iraq during the Gulf War which was – and remains to this day – the largest deployment of British military personnel since World War Two.
(Pay no heed to Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman, who this morning tweeted that “King Charles II” was coming: the previous Charles has been dead for 341 years.)
Quite a few royals are expected in Washington this year for the 250th anniversary of the United States. The king and queen of the Netherlands are also set for an April visit – while Charles’s heir Prince William and his wife Kate are rumored to be coming in for the Independence Day celebrations. With so many royals in town on July 4, the holiday marking the birth of our republic might look more like an All Kings Day.
Will Charles praise Congress for defying his ancestor, King George III, and forming this new government? Should we expect No Kings protesters taking things a bit too literally? Perhaps tone-deaf jokes about giving ourselves back to England?
Trump’s ego might prove helpful in this regard. Given his track record with foreign leaders who come to visit, Trump always finds a way to show a monarch, prime minister or supreme leader who’s President. This is how the world works two and a half centuries after the Revolutionary War: led by an American empire, for better or worse. Having a few sheepish royals in town might be the perfect set-up for the most realistic Fourth of July reenactment in 250 years. Someone call Lin-Manuel.
On our radar
STRETCH ARMSTRONG Governor Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma has selected energy executive Alan Armstrong to fill Markwayne Mullin’s seat in the US Senate.
NEVER MIND THE BALLOTS President Trump voted by mail in today’s Palm Beach special election, while threatening to hold up all legislation until the SAVE Act – which bans mail-in voting – is passed.
NICK OF TIME Self-described “alpha male” Nick Adams has been appointed “Special Presidential Envoy for American Tourism, Exceptionalism, and Values.” Adams was previously nominated as US ambassador to Malaysia but was quietly dropped last month.
Life’s a beach
In dark times, it’s good to fall back on the rites of passage that unite us. So thank you Jesse Watters, in this period of war and economic turmoil, for reminding a nation on edge what it truly means to be American, through the ritual of the Fox News spring-break vox pop.
Johnny Belisario, a correspondent for Jesse Watters Primetime, was dispatched to the beaches of America to interview sauced-up, swimwear-clad college students. The kids give predictably dumb answers, and their boomer parents watching back home lament the thousands of dollars they’re shelling out on higher education.
A peroxide-blonde young woman clad in a white bikini and a cross shares her plans to “black out with my rack out.” A gentleman wearing what appears to be a St. Christopher pledges to “get with as many girls as we can… and not come back with a STD [sic].”
“What issue facing America is the most important to you?” asks Belisario. “What bikini I’m gonna wear next,” the peroxide blonde replies.
“We’re going to war with Iraq,” a different blonde girl says, “that’s been crazy.” Almost. Later, the same young lady says, “Venezuela… isn’t that in Spain?” Not for a while.
Then and now
February 2025 – Reacher star Alan Ritchson in a GQ interview, when asked about his high-school classmate Matt Gaetz:
“That motherfucker. We are adversaries… It’s shocking to me that the panhandle of Florida continues to vote for somebody – knowing everything we know about him and the promises that he’s made behind closed doors about pardoning certain criminals – he’s just not a good dude!”
March 2026 – Gaetz on X following a TMZ report about Ritchson getting into a fight with his neighbor:
“Don’t do steroids.”
Till Trump do us part
Donald Trump – whose first marriage ended only after his affair with Marla Maples was exposed, and has been married twice more since – has opinions about the correct timetable for widower remarriage. Joe Kent remarried “fairly quickly” Trump said, four years after his wife was killed by a suicide bomber in Syria in January 2016 while serving as a Navy intelligence officer.
These comments follow Kent’s resignation as director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center. “As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people,” he wrote.
Re-marriage shaming seems to be a go-to for the President when dealing with defiant subordinates. “Did Thomas Massie… get married already??? Boy, that was quick!” he wrote when Massie remarried after his wife died of an autoimmune disease.
It’s almost as if it’s an inside joke with himself. Cockburn sure hopes the comments about giving Kent the job out of pity were also a private joke, and not an honest assessment of the man he installed atop the nation’s counterterrorism apparatus.
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