A Majestic Inheritance: What Trump’s Remarks to King Charles Mean for the Special Relationship and about Who Americans Really Are

Trump recasts America not as an abstract creed but as a civilization rooted in a distinct people—arguing that change the people, and you change the nation itself.

Here are two quotations, one from Donald Trump this week and one from Thomas Jefferson. I won’t tell you which is which.

Here’s the first: “For nearly two centuries before the revolution, this land [America] was settled and forged by men and women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. Here on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride.”

And the second: “The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic. Fate drew a long arc from the meadow at Runnymede to the streets of Philadelphia that ran through the lives of people born and bred on the British code that no man should be denied either justice or right.”

Apologies: I tricked you. Both quotations were, in fact, from Donald Trump this week, as he welcomed King Charles to the US with a display of pomp and pageantry fit for, well, a king—and a king of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, no less. Redcoats and Colonial soldiers stood to attention alongside US Marines as King Charles and Queen Camilla arrived at the White House. At a state dinner, lavish tributes were offered from both sides of the Atlantic to the shared history of the two great nations, and renewed commitments for the future were made.

And in a stunningly clever bit of flattery, King Charles gave the president the ship’s bell from HMS Trump, a Royal Navy vessel that saw action in the Pacific in World War II—a shining brass bell emblazoned with the words “TRUMP 1944.” He told the president to just ring it if he ever needed help. Trump was visibly moved, and it wasn’t hard to see why.

I don’t think a president has ever spoken as warmly or as genuinely of America’s kinship and debt to Britain as President Trump did this week, certainly not since the early years of the republic. Among the Founders, John and Samuel Adams and George Mason wrote about what they, their fellow colonists, and later the fledgling republic owed to Britain—descent, culture, and custom, a unique form of government centered on individual liberty—but it was Thomas Jefferson, most of all, who conceived of the United States of America as a distinctively British—or, rather, English—project. I’ll only use “Britain” for the sake of convenience and consistency here.

In Jefferson’s view, the American Founding was not so much a break with Britain, her people, and her political tradition, as a continuation of them. In his 1774 pamphlet A Summary of the Rights of British America, for example, Jefferson drew an explicit parallel between the Anglo-Saxon migrations from Germany to Britain and the British migration to the Thirteen Colonies: the same people, doing the same thing, a thousand years apart. Jefferson also famously suggested Hengist and Horsa, the warlords who led the Saxon invasion of Britain, should have a place on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States. They were, Jefferson wrote, “the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honour of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.”

King Charles’s visit comes at a critical moment in UK–US relations. In recent months, the so-called “Special Relationship” has seemed, at times, to be close to an end, if not over completely. President Trump already had choice words for Prime Minister Keir Starmer before the war with Iran—about the effects of mass immigration and the British government’s clampdown on freedom of speech, especially—but those criticisms have paled in comparison with the slings and arrows Trump has launched at Starmer for his failure to support him as Tony Blair once supported George W. Bush.

“This is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with,” Trump said, before comparing Starmer to Neville Chamberlain, the man who appeased Hitler. Starmer was too slow to allow US forces to use British bases, including the vital base on Diego Garcia, and his offers of help have been anything but helpful. “We don’t need people that join wars after they’re won!” Trump exclaimed.

The royal visit clearly served a pragmatic purpose—for both sides. Despite what President Trump has said about the UK and Prime Minister Starmer in particular, the US does still need the UK and may still need UK military force to open the Strait of Hormuz and keep it open. If Trump can’t stomach meeting Starmer face to face right now, he can certainly stomach King Charles, whose mother, Queen Elizabeth, he was hugely fond of. And after all, the British monarch is above politics and its vicissitudes. Prime ministers will come and go—and Starmer could go any day now, it seems—but the monarchy is permanent. The Special Relationship can survive Keir Starmer, even if he’s the worst prime minister in British history. In a crowded field, he just might be.

But, in his fulsome praise and focus on America’s British pedigree, I think Trump was doing more than just expressing a need for the US and the UK to continue working together. He was saying something about America, too, and what it really means to be American. Trump came the closest of any modern president to directly repudiating the notion of America as an idea and to reasserting a biological—yes, an ethnic—grounding to American nationhood. No right-wing president, not even Reagan, did that. In fact, Reagan was only too enthusiastic to celebrate America’s uniqueness as a nation that isn’t a people but rather a proposition or series of propositions.

The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true. In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea, but the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic.

America is, of course, a nation of ideas and values, but those ideas and values came from somewhere. They were made by a distinctive people, and without that distinctive people, America could not exist. The corollary to this, left unspoken but surely understood by Trump, is that if the people change, the nation and its values change: that “majestic inheritance” is first imperiled, then eventually disappears.

And that’s exactly what’s happening. In combination with radical changes to America’s immigration policies, the Constitution and increasingly the character of America have been transformed in a little over half a century, probably more than at any other time in her history. The “propositional nation” has served to justify demographic change of a kind its architects, men like Ted Kennedy, promised would never take place and would have horrified the Founding Fathers.

No president since 1965 and Hart-Celler has dared to push back against this new deracinated ideal of American identity—abstract, rootless, a badge anyone from anywhere can pin on their chest—except Donald Trump. He’s made reversing demographic change the central policy of his second term, but he’s gone much further than that and done things that even a year ago would have seemed outlandish, if not impossible, like changing America’s refugee policy to allow entry only to white South African farmers and persecuted European dissidents. At present, the Supreme Court is considering the legality of President Trump’s attempt to outlaw birthright citizenship. What a political earthquake that could be.

More than anything else, to my eyes at least, President Trump’s appeal to America’s deep roots, stretching back to Runnymede and Magna Carta and beyond, even to the forests of ancient Germany, is his commitment to a political revolution in the real sense of the word: a full turn of the wheel, right back to the beginning. The closest thing America has had to a Second Founding.

2 posted on 05/01/2026 7:29:14 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)

“...celebrate America’s uniqueness...”

Because we are unique and better. The closer we become to be like Europe the less unique we become and lesser as the nation we were designed to be.

Will King Charles wake up to the threat of islam in his country?

Funny you should ask ...

In good King Charles' golden days when loyalty no harm meant
A pious man of God was I and so I gained preferment.
There is no god but God quoth I, Muhammad is His prophet.
The infidel sign upon the flag shall soon be taken off it.
And this be law, I will maintain ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYndJV6iepQ

I wonder why Camilla returned to the UK instead of accompanying the king.

Anyone know where Harry is...?

There is no way I will ever honor anything British. Those miscreants have been trying to take down America since America booted them out.

Where was Chuck going after his trip here? Maybe he was going to see Harold somewhere and Camilla wasn’t part of the plan.

Prime ministers will come and go—and Starmer could go any day now, it seems—but the monarchy is permanent.

Will King Charles wake up to the threat of islam in his country?

The British monarchy ended long ago.What the British have now is actors on a stage pretending to be aristocracy for the tourist.

Charles is all down with the Muslim invasion. Charles has a nice side gig going on selling his soul to the Muslims to promote the Muslim invasion.

Charles detest democracy, capitalism and the British people.

11 posted on 05/01/2026 8:22:02 AM PDT by Pontiac (The welfare state must fail because it is contrary to human nature and diminisheRs the human spirit.)

Same here. We’re coming up on 250 years of independence from these tea swilling Brits. Over on You Tube there’s no shortage of video from the Uk. They seem to think Trump is their president too.

The best accomplishment of the British Empire was the creation of Independence Days all over the world.

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