No Kings

President Trump lavished praise upon King Charles from the Oval Office at the outset of his four-day state visit to the United States. He called the monarch “a man of class” and said “it’s great to have a king in here”. A conspicuous absence of “No Kings” protests in the presence of a real king had not gone unnoticed. But it was Charles’s address to a joint session of Congress that was eagerly awaited on both sides of the Atlantic. His most substantial public speech since he acceded the throne in September 2022, there was a good deal riding on its success. His mother had addressed Congress in May 1991. Her text was an uncontroversial message of “collaboration and respect” between the two nations.

The nationwide No Kings protest attracted, according to varying estimates, between 600,000 and 600 million Americans. Republicans either denigrated the protests as a kind of retirement-home activity for permanently terrified MSNBC boomers or as cover for bloodthirsty Antifa terrorists who want to destroy America and, in the words of House Speaker Mike Johnson, bring about “a rise of Marxism in the Democratic Party.” Or, you know, why not both?  Coverage of the protests reflected this schizo vibe. There were a lot of sad Boomer ladies in tie-dye T-shirts carrying Orange Man Bad posters, and some footage of grotesque, twisted far leftists mocking the murder of Charlie Kirk.