Hello and welcome to Palace Intrigue. I am your host, Mark Francis. Donald Trump says he is apparently no longer planning to annex Canada. In a new interview with royal biographer Robert Hardman, Trump joked that despite all his past talk about Canada becoming America's 51st state, He has now concluded there simply is not enough time left in his presidency to erase two centuries of Canadian identity. I suppose the Canadians have got 200 years of history and all that. Oh, Canada thing, Trump said. You can't deal with that in three and a half years. I guess it's not going to happen. According to Hardman, the moment came after he told Trump to please leave Canada alone, adding that annexing the country would undoubtedly make the king of Canada unhappy. That prompted Trump to ask, do they still recognize the king or have they stopped that? When told that Canadians do still recognize King Charles as head of state, Trump reportedly replied, but they have these terrible politicians, they're nice to my face and then they say bad things behind my back. The problem is some guy drew that straight line to make a border. He should have just drawn it 50 miles further north and there wouldn't have been a problem. Last year, after Trump repeatedly floated the idea of Canada as the 51st state, King Charles made a carefully choreographed visit to Ottawa for the state opening of Parliament. During that trip, he told Canadians their country was strong and free in what was widely seen as a subtle but unmistakable assertion of Canadian sovereignty. Trump also had warm words for the king personally, calling him a fantastic guy and praising the way he has handled his cancer diagnosis. He's a great guy and he's grown so much in the last 10 years, and especially over the last couple of years as king, his fight has shown that, Trump said. He also reflected on Queen Elizabeth II, saying he once tried to get her to reveal her favorite presidents and prime ministers, but she refused to take the bait. So I realized that's why she lasted 70 years without a complaint, because she was so good at it, Trump said. The rest of us would have said, oh, I liked so-and-so, but she was so clever, and I know she liked me because we talked a lot. The king has found himself unexpectedly pulled into Donald Trump's latest broadside over NATO and the war in Iran. In an interview with The Telegraph, the U.S. president claimed the king would have taken a very different view from Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer over the conflict, saying his majesty would have stood by the president more closely. Trump said of the king I like him I always liked him as a prince He a good man a great representative for your country before adding I think he would have taken a very different stand on the war in Iran but he doesn do that I mean he a great gentleman He also described the monarch as a friend of mine and said, I have a great relationship with King Charles. I've known him a long time. Trump went on to praise the king personally, saying, he's a wonderful and brave man. To be honest with you, he's been through a lot in many ways. In the Telegraph, John Hemmings suggests King Charles could use his upcoming address to Congress not as a ceremonial speech, but as a strategic intervention to try to steady a badly strained Anglo-American alliance. His main suggestion is that the King should start by reminding Congress that the special relationship is much deeper than current politics. Hemings says Charles should frame it not just around the Second World War and Cold War, but around the longer shared democratic tradition between Britain and America, even going back to the English Civil War, and figures like Thomas Paine. In other words, this is not just a diplomacy, it is a shared political DNA. He also thinks Charles should widen that argument into the broader English-speaking security block. Hemmings points to the five eyes countries, the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as a uniquely durable alliance built not just on sentiment but on real military intelligence and bureaucratic integration. His point is that this relationship is still operational, not nostalgic. A big part of the piece is essentially a plea for the king to defend NATO in language that can still appeal to a sceptical American audience. Hemmings argues that Charles should make the case that NATO remains in both British and American self-interest, and he suggests the king should note that alliance burden sharing has improved. He writes that for the first time, all NATO members have reached the 2% GDP spending target and says Charles should underline that allies have also agreed to move toward 5% by 2035. In his substack, Deep Crown wrote at length about Charles' trip. Deep Crown explains, let us talk about what he is actually walking into, because I think it is not fully appreciated, outside of certain rooms in certain buildings on both sides of the Atlantic, quite how extraordinarily delicate this moment is. Charles is a constitutional monarch. That is not a decorative fact. It is the central governing fact of everything he does and does not do. He does not have foreign policy positions. He does not have opinions about wars, at least not ones that can be uttered aloud. He holds in the ancient and largely theoretical language of the prerogative the power to declare war and exercises it precisely never That is the arrangement That is the deal It has worked more or less for several centuries What he is being asked to do in Washington is something rather more complicated than a state visit. He is being asked to be royal with a capital R in a room full of people who are watching him for signals he is constitutionally forbidden from sending. Every senator in that chamber will be looking for something. The administration will be looking for an endorsement, however, oblique, of the current direction of American foreign policy. The opposition will be looking for a flicker of discomfort they can use. The British government, whose relationship with the White House is at this moment something less than warm, will be hoping the King can do what their own diplomats have been unable to do, walk into that building and make the Americans feel well disposed toward them without anyone being able to say quite why. And he must do all of this while saying, functionally, nothing the can be quoted out of context, nothing that can be clipped, nothing that can be held up the following morning as evidence of a royal view on a matter of active political controversy. He must be present and yet absent. He must be warm and yet neutral. He must fill a room and leave no fingerprints. This is, I want to be clear, an almost impossible brief. The President has already complicated things considerably. His remarks to the Telegraph last week, the suggestion that the King privately saw things different from Sir Keir were not a compliment. They were a trap, elegantly disguised as one. And the palace, to its credit, did not step in it. Five words in silence. That is the correct response. But the trap remains set, and Charles will have to walk past it in front of a joint session of Congress, while cameras record every micro-expression. Into this walks Charles, with his careful suits and his careful words and his decades of practice of being in rooms where everyone wants something from him that he cannot give. He is, and I say this with some genuine admiration, extraordinarily well suited to exactly this kind of moment, not because he is a natural politician, which he is not, but because he has spent his entire adult life learning to inhabit a role that requires him to mean more than he says. That is a very particular skill. Most people never require it. He has had 70 odd years of instruction. The crown itself is the message that it's the thing that is easy to lose sight of in the noise of the current moment, simply standing there representing the continuity and the dignity of an institution that has outlasted every political crisis it has ever encountered is in itself a form of argument a quiet one but not an unpersuasive one you do not need to say that alliances matter that institutions matter that the patient work of Diplomacy matters if you are the living embodiment of all three you simply need to be in the room Whether it is enough for this room on this trip at this moment I honestly do not know I think it might be. I think he understands better than he is sometimes given credit for that the visit itself is the statement. That arriving, behaving impeccably and leaving without incident is a diplomatic achievement of the first order when the world is arranged as it currently is. Nobody will ask about any of this at the state dinner. Incidentally, they will talk about the gardens at Windsor in the King's watercolours and whether the Queen is enjoying Washington. And that, in its way, is exactly how it is supposed to work. You can subscribe to Deep Crown for free by searching for Deep Crown on Google or click the link in the show notes or check out Deep Crown on Substack. We'll be back in a moment. Meghan Markle's Easter Instagram post has sparked another round of criticism after one particular video of Princess Lilibet, left some viewers calling the clip unsettling rather than sweet. Megan shared a collection of Easter moments from the family's Montecito home, including footage of chickens being fed, eggs being hunted, and Archie and Lilibet running through the garden. But it was one short video of four-year-old Lilibet wandering alone across the lawn in bunny ears, carrying two stuffed animals that grew the strongest reaction online. The clip showed Lilibet filmed from behind as she walked barefoot through the garden in a pink dress, and some critics said the way it was shot felt odd rather than candid. One commenter wrote, This is kind of creepy. It's like Lily has a stalker and we're seeing through his eyes. Another added, Agreed, it has a truly sinister feel to it. A third person wrote, Even creepier that it's her own mother who is following behind her and filming an innocent moment to post on Instagram to bait the public into paying them attention. Some people are describing the video as the Montecito Blair Witch Project. People notes that both Archie and Lilibet appear to have inherited Harry's red hair, although in slightly different shades. Archie's is described as more auburn, while Lilibet's appearance appears to be a lighter ginger, much closer to Harry's own colouring. Harry joked about the Spencer gene with Stephen Colbert in 2023, saying, The ginger gene is a strong one. The Spencer gene is very, very strong. I actually really, genuinely thought at the beginning of my relationship with Meghan that should this go the distance and we have kids, that there's no way the ginger gene will stand up to my wife's genes, but I was wrong. Go gingers. And there you have it. If you'd like to email us, our address is thepalaceintrigue at gmail.com. Please follow us on Spotify, Apple, or the app of your choice. I'm Mark Francis. My thanks to John McDermott. This is Palace Intrigue. Good times.
