"It's impossible to know what Trump would treat as an established fact." [View all]

[Emrys]

I've been catching up on reading the UK coverage of King Charles' visit to the US, and the line above from an Independent article had me chuckling, both for its obvious accuracy and for its dry, catty diplomatic understatement worthy of an episode of Yes, Prime Minister.

It came from royal commentator Richard Fitzwilliams, among many other reactions from the UK's ranks of Royal Whisperers. The whole article's worth a read if you're a fan of British protocol and the country's long-suffering ennui with Trump's antics:

Royal sources ‘flab­ber­gas­ted’ after Trump said Charles backs Iran war
...
[Trump] said: “We have mil­it­ar­ily defeated that par­tic­u­lar oppon­ent [Iran], and we’re never going to let that oppon­ent ever – Charles agrees with me even more than I do – we’re never going to let that oppon­ent have a nuc­lear weapon.”

Buck­ing­ham Palace cla­ri­fied that Charles had simply reflec­ted UK Gov­ern­ment policy when it came to Iran and nuc­lear weapons, rather than offer any sup­port for US for­eign policy.
...
One royal source told The i Paper: “He went off script. I was flab­ber­gas­ted that he said that,” adding that Trump’s remark could be inter­preted as imply­ing the King sup­por­ted the US mis­sion against Iran.

“It was very poor form to put the King in that situ­ation.”

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-i-paper/20260430/281784225696655

Perhaps suspecting that Trump might pull such a stunt (and recalling how Trump's lawyers before he became president used to hold meetings with him in pairs because he had a tendency to fabricate or deny what he'd said and agreed to in previous meetings), it was arranged for the UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper to accompany Charles into Trump's gilded bearpit, not so much to keep Charles in line - he's an old hand at diplomacy, having been trained for this role all his life - but to provide a witness in the event of precisely this problem cropping up of Trump being a stranger to reality and being willing to say any old shit that pops into his head and serves his purpose at a given moment.

He tried to drive a wedge between the king and Trump's appointed punchbag of the hour Keir Starmer, which was a fitting cherry on top of the cake of all the other more minor diplomatic incidents that had peppered Charles' visit.