Should the threat to Canada affect Trump's state visit to the U.K.?
Sudden British angst about how the American President's visit will impact Canada and its King
Should the existential threat to Canada’s existence being posed by the head of state of the nation to our south affect that same person’s state visit to the United Kingdom?
In recent days, the British press has been full of articles and podcasts focused on how Britain should be considering the impact on Canada of the state visit in September by U.S. President Donald Trump, as well as the difficult position in which the visit places King Charles III, who is the head of state of both the United Kingdom and Canada.
To this Canadian, the British angst about the timing of the state visit feels a bit overwrought. Let’s be honest: Brits rarely have to think of their monarch as head of state of another nation with competing interests, while Canadians always know that to be true since our monarch has always lived in a different nation, going back to the establishment of New France in 1534.
BACKGROUND
By all accounts, Charles has been particularly aggrieved by President Donald Trump’s declarations that Canada should become the “51st state,” which helps explain why the King of Canada travelled more than 5,000 km to open Canada’s Parliament in order to give a throne speech that proclaimed that his northern realm will remain both sovereign and independent. That act proved to be very popular among Canadians.
Canadians were also angered when close allies, including but not limited to British PM Keir Starmer, were notably mute on the subject of American annexation of Canada, when Donald Trump first raised the issue in December 2024.
Neither were many Canadians happy that Starmer had offered a very rare second state visit invitation to the U.S. president in February. "To be frank, [Canadians] weren't impressed by that gesture... given the circumstance," Prime Minister Mark Carney commented in May.
FYI: In January, I wrote about the extent of Charles’s duty to Canada in this era of existential crisis in “Charles III has to prove he’s truly the King of Canada.”
The genesis of this post was reading the strong opinions from a royal writer whose work I’ve long followed. What came next revealed a stark difference in attitudes on either side of the Atlantic toward the upcoming state visit to the United Kingdom by U.S. President Donald Trump, and its possible impact on Canada.
THE PEG
Late on Tuesday evening, the Times reported there were “concerns” raised between the palace and government over the state visit, now set for September, in particular about Donald Trump’s continued threats to annex Canada:
Sir Keir Starmer has gone against the wishes of the King in bringing President Trump’s state visit forward, despite the monarch’s concerns over threats to Canada.
Britain and the US are expected to confirm that a full state visit by the president will take place in September as Starmer prioritises his attempt to curry favour with Trump.
Going against the original proposal for an earlier informal visit outlined by the King, the prime minister has expedited a full “bells and whistles” visit in an attempt to capitalise on the president’s fascination with the royal family.
…
The revised timetable has put pressure on the King as head of state for Canada after Trump repeatedly said that the country could become the 51st state of the US.
The Times understands that the Palace raised concerns about Trump’s threats to Canada, seeing it as a reason not to rush into a state visit. One senior source said that a senior Palace aide had told government officials that the King did not want to fête Trump with a state visit while the president was “impugning his sovereignty” over Canada.
The Times story was quickly confirmed by other media outlets in Britain.
THE REACTION
Christopher Wilson has been writing about the royals for more than two decades. I don’t always agree with his opinions about the Windsors, but I always read his pieces. And like others interested in royalty and history, we sometimes banter back and forth on social media, and occasionally in emails.
So I read with interest his Twitter/X thread pegged to the Times article. (Note: I asked and immediately received his permission to use excerpts from our online and offline correspondence on this topic for this post. I’ve edited them for length and clarity.)
As Wilson stated:
The danger here is that politics is again straying into sovereign territory, and weakening the strength of very establishment which makes Britain different. IMV [in my view] King Charles's stance over Canada is historically correct & Downing St will be seen to have weakened the monarchy
These are indeed difficult days for Charles, who has carefully shaped a soft-power reign, deliberately designed to preserve the dignity of the throne, only to see it undermined by politicians
“Starmer took away a bargaining tool,” stated Wilson in our exchange. “Shut up about Canada and you can have all the bells and whistles. Otherwise, there may be a delay. It's that simple.”
Wilson’s view that Starmer should have used the state visit, which President Trump really wants, as a diplomatic cudgel to get him to stop his “51st state” threats toward Canada, isn’t unique in Britain. For obvious reasons, I keep a close watch on what is being said regarding the royals in Britain, and noticed the same sentiments being expressed by others.
In this week’s episode of the Daily Mail’s hugely popular Palace Confidential podcast, Richard Eden stated:
I really do feel for the King because we have a government that seems desperate to suck up to Donald Trump and they are using the King for that purpose, sort of forgetting, it seems, that he is also the King of Canada.
“They’ve put him in an awkward position. And I’m not surprised that he wanted to delay the state visit until things had calmed down. Look, they could have used things to try to put a bit of pressure on Trump. They could have said, ‘We’ve got this state visit next year, perhaps, but you do need to pipe down about Canada because it’s disrespectful to Canadians and it’s disrespectful to the king.’ And that may have acted as pressure. But they said, “No, no, no, you come. We’ll arrange a state visit as soon as you want.”
I can’t see how that “pipe down about Canada or the state visit is delayed” strategy would work. On a very practical level, based on Trump’s actions to date, does anyone expect him to just quietly accept such a demand posed by a Western government?
I also note that President Trump seems to perceive empathy and/or cooperation toward Canada as weakness (for the doubtful, see his views on the EU, aid to Ukraine, or NATO mutual defence.) Based on the president’s actions to date, I wrote to Wilson that I assumed “he’d just twist any defence/request [to aid Canada by the U.K. government] into an attack and still insist on his state visit.”
As Wilson responded:
My priority in writing here was to demonstrate the gradual erosion of monarchical power by Downing Street. Nobody believes that Charles should rule absolutely, but rid him of any diplomatic muscle and he becomes a cipher. Starmer just took away a bargaining chip which might (I only say might) have helped silence Trump. Keeping him waiting for the full state visit, which he so clearly cherishes, is the kind of soft power I was talking about. Canada needs its allies and Starmer just did Canada a disservice, is my view.
While Wilson is quite passionate in wanting to have Britain be seen to help Canada, I see things quite differently from my side of the Atlantic:
Gotta say that as a Canadian, I see this fuss about timing of the state visit as a whole lot of nothing. What no one asks in the UK is “When in the next four years would be a better time for a state visit?”
“This existential crisis for Canada doesn’t change if the state visit to the U.K. is in September 2025 or 2026 or 2027,” I wrote in that online conversation with Wilson. (Also, a state visit is out for 2026 because there is likely to be a royal visit to the United States for its 250th anniversary, which I referenced in my January post. One doesn’t have inbound and outbound state visits in the same year. And I can’t imagine President Trump waiting until 2027 for his time at the centre of regal splendour.)
I noted that I think that British and Canadian views of how to deal with the U.S. president may be so very different because we were on the front lines of attacks that kept coming and coming during his first term in office, including suddenly ripping up the free trade agreement between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Meanwhile, many other Western nations were spared the brunt of that economic and political turmoil. (As I write this post, Trump announced he’d suddenly ended trade negotiations with Canada and was threatening to impose even more tariffs on us.)
I also believe that moves by the U.K. government, Buckingham Palace, and Canada have dampened the impact of Trump’s state visit in September:
The Ottawa visit was a huge international story and showed the world that Charles is very much the King of Canada
There’s now discussion bubbling up about how the state visit is at the behest of the British government, not the monarch, and how the King will dutifully fulfill his role as host
Trump’s state visit at Windsor Castle will be the second of the year, coming a mere two months after that for French President Emmanuel Macron in July, who will have the first state visit at the castle since 2014 (Trump’s first state visit in 2019 was to Buckingham Palace, now not an option due to ongoing renovations.)
On a geeky historical note, Donald Trump’s two state visits isn’t as unique / unprecedented as some have been proclaiming. Six monarchs and one elected president (Poincaré of France) have also had two state visits, with the last occurring 25 years ago:
Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany in 1891 & 1907
King Vittorio Emmanuel III of Italy in 1903 & 1924
King Haakon VII of Norway in 1906 & 1951
President Raymond Poincaré of France in 1913 & 1919
Queen Juliana of the Netherlands in 1950 & 1972
King Olav V of Norway in 1962 & 1988
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark in 1974 & 2000
For those wondering about what happened to the plan for a private visit by Trump to the King in Scotland ahead of the state visit — it didn’t work because of timing. As the Daily Mail’s Rebecca English noted, the available gap in Trump’s schedule would have coincided with the King’s “ring-fenced downtime,” required as he’s been working quite hard this year and needs time to be away.
By our proximity to the American behemoth, we are often in the firing line when it comes to tariffs and other issues affecting our relationship: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt,” said the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1969. Now, nations around the world, including the United Kingdom, are learning what it’s like to be directly and severely affected by the actions of the American administration like Canada.
Trump wants a state visit. The United Kingdom wants a good economic relationship with its No. 1 trading partner. In her podcast with Kate Mansey, one of the co-authors of that Times article about the state visit, Roya Nikkah of the Sunday Times stated:
“State visits, incoming and outgoing, are all about who the government wants to butter up, who we feel we owe. …And it’s also about trade and bilateral relations. And we got this trade deal with the U.S. and it’s been absolutely trumpeted that we are the first big nation to get a trade deal under the new tenure there.”
“Starmer is acting in the best interest of the UK,” I wrote to Wilson. I assume that whoever was living at 10 Downing Street would have made the same decision for the benefit of the United Kingdom. Heck, Canada took a similar diplomatically pragmatic path when we hosted the G7 leaders, including, yup, the man who wants to annex us.
In the end, I and other Canadians may not like the British state visit decision but we understand it. When asked whether the Trump invitation was “appropriate,” Canada’s Carney said, “I leave the diplomacy to the U.K. government.”
My latest Royal Roundup on Global TV’s The Morning Show on June 23, 2025: