During her 70-year reign, Queen Elizabeth met almost every U.S. President from Dwight Eisenhower to Joe Biden. But it was in 1991, when she met with President George H.W. Bush, that she became the first British Monarch to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress.
The visit couldn’t have been better timed. President George H.W. Bush was riding sky-high popularity—76% approval in Gallup’s polling that same month!—after having painstakingly assembled an international coalition to win a clean war in the Middle East. Bush and Prime Minister John Major were thick as thieves. The United States was negotiating the final stages of tariff-reducing NAFTA and framing up what would become the World Trade Organization. Bush was in constant contact with Mikhail Gorbachev to stage-manage the structured collapse of the Soviet empire. The global economy was coming out of an economic recession and Washington was heading into its longest economic expansion in U.S. history.
When King Charles III on Tuesday follows in his late mother’s footsteps as the second British Monarch to address Congress, he will be doing so in a Washington unrecognizable from the Queen’s triumphant visit 35 years earlier. Donald Trump is facing the worst approval numbers of his second term—a meager 36% in Gallup’s latest surveys—as he leads an unpopular Iran War and aggravates allies around the world. Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer have been on the outs over the lack of Brits on the battlefield in Iran. Trump’s erratic tariffs, his contempt for NATO, and uneven support for Ukraine’s defense against a Russian invasion have left him fairly alone. Vladimir Putin seems uncanny in his management of a relationship with Trump despite the menace facing former Eastern Bloc nations. And while unemployment is low and the stock market is high, consumer confidence is down in the dumps, and the latest Fox News poll finds Democrats have the edge over Republicans on economic issues for the first time since 2010.
It’s hard to imagine Charles giving the kind of speech Elisabeth delivered to such glowing reviews. “Some people believe that power grows from the barrel of the gun,” the Queen said. “So it can, but history shows that it never grows well nor for very long. Force, in the end, is sterile. We have gone a better way; our societies rest on mutual agreement, on contract and on consensus.”
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