The King, the Queen, and the Ballroom Blitz
God, it was nice for British embassy guests to see King Charles and Queen Camilla in person yesterday afternoon! As the royal pair emerged with elderly, familiar grace onto the portico steps of the residence and stood side by side, rooted in history, the volatile Washington circus finally came to a stop. Two teary national anthems were played. There was the sweet smell of freshly mown grass, small sandwiches were passed, and the better-dressed-than-usual DC crowd waited respectfully in assembled “pods” for Their Majesties to unfreeze their pose and descend to emit magical civility.
Given that the last time many in this crowd had seen each other was underneath a table in the Washington Hilton ballroom as a would-be presidential assassin at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner stormed a checkpoint and was wrestled to the ground, the embassy garden party was mint tea for the nerves. Everyone was comparing their Saturday night vignettes of Secret Service heroes vaulting over scattering silverware or the sight of a disorientated RFK Jr. being armpit-lifted out of danger with his actress wife scurrying behind. Right before the king and queen deplaned at Joint Base Andrews, Trump’s creamy-faced flak Karoline Leavitt turned her valedictory, pre-maternity leave speech from the podium into a gargantuan gaslight session of the traumatized press, blaming Saturday night’s violence on hate-filled discourse purveyed by Democrats and the media. Wait, wasn’t it her boss, Donald J. Trump, who godfathered the Jan. 6 mayhem, excoriated the murdered Rob and Michele Reiner last December for having “Trump derangement syndrome,” and commemorated the death of former FBI director Robert Mueller in March with the Truth Social post “Good”? Trump himself in his post-dinner press conference took his propensity to attract assassins as proof he is a president of consequence, like Lincoln (but not, apparently, like Gerald Ford, who nearly took a bullet from Manson mini-maniac Squeaky Fromme).
On the embassy lawn in the spring sunshine, the king glided through the parting crowd as if he were on casters. He first greeted a bipartisan cluster of ingratiating pols that included gangly Scott Bessent, stocky Mike Johnson, Steve Miller with his shiny cue ball head, and Nancy Pelosi, her four-inch heels defiantly sinking in the grass.
In my “pod,” as embassy officials called the groupings, was CNN’s imperturbable Kaitlan Collins, the writer Sally Quinn, James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli, and the Amazonian comms diva Tammy Haddad, whose air of distraction was explained by the fact that she was wearing smart glasses that transmitted video to her phone. “Can you believe this is my 20th visit?” the king said to me buoyantly when he reached our side, while Camilla’s twinkly periwinkle eyes communicated immediate girlfriend intimacy to all. “Jet lag is killing me,” she confided. To me: “You’re still writing, I see.” (A rueful, I-miss-nothing smile.) “I do keep track.” Some museum director dude crashed our pod and introduced himself to the king. “Difficult times!” said the monarch sagely, perhaps a more relevant-sounding standby than his mother’s favored “Have you come far?” The comedian Matt Friend, in a perfect strangulated Charles voice, told the king he was polishing his impression of him. “Keep trying,” said Charles, rolling on to the next fifty millionth person he would be polite to. Having landed from London two hours before and having already experienced a pulverizing, over-length tea with the Trumps at the White House, it’s not hard to decode the “interest” the sovereign of famously refined taste showed in the meteor-sized crater destined to become the ballooning Trump ballroom.
The Iran war, Trump’s tension with British PM Keir Starmer, and new rumblings from a leaked Pentagon email that the U.S. might reconsider its support for Europe holding on to its “imperial possessions,” such as the Falkland Islands (where the banished Andrew Mountbatten Windsor had his fifteen minutes of military fame), were the afternoon’s unspoken conversational penumbra. Weaving through the embassy pods the king was in the throne zone, nursing a gin and tonic and small-talking for his country. He was here to celebrate the long sweep of 250 years of history, not the president who won’t be around the 21st time he drops by.
Strictly Ballroom
It’s been much commented on since Saturday night that, in a room full of super informed political journalists, a prevailing first reaction to the shots fired was that the tumult in the corridor was all a hoax. No one knows what to believe anymore. It is Trump, not the press, whose reign of chaos has deracinated national equilibrium and birthed a citizenry of the dazed and confused. Trump’s prepared speech had been destined to be a sneering tirade about fake media malfeasance. The would-be assassin gave the press a night of terror instead of a night of humiliation.
As we all pick apart the astounding security lapses at the Washington Hilton (the only bipartisan agreement is a desire for the annual dinner to finally dump that dump), it’s worth noting how much 21st-century violence has been conceived with low-tech strategies. Terrorists armed with box cutters on 9/11; Hamas’s satanic hang gliders on October 7th; and small, agile Iranian boats planting mines in the Strait of Hormuz can outwit high-tech surveillance and costly lethal firepower. A simple hotel key for a room at the Hilton that Cole Tomas Allen checked into on the dinner’s eve was all that was needed to penetrate the venue where the most powerful people in the world were gathered. Given how much Trump loves dated action movies, it blows my mind that no one in the Secret Service remembered the 1993 movie In The Line of Fire, in which Clint Eastwood plays a fictional member of JFK’s detail, and John Malkovich the assassin in a tux who penetrates the hotel’s porous places, including the magnetometers. Allen himself marveled in his manifesto about how easy it was to access the outer rims of the dinner. “I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo.”
It’s notable, too, that all the recent assassins and wannabees have been manosphere gamesters, their hermetic worldview shaped by 24/7 reality detachment, violent video imagery, and swirling, toxic internet conspiracy theories that have metastasized under a president who continues to deny he lost the 2020 election. 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, who is charged with shooting Charlie Kirk; 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was “neutralized” after grazing Trump’s ear with a bullet from a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania; and Cole Allen, the 31-year-old radicalized engineering teacher, who sparked havoc at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, are all smart, thwarted knockoff Luigis wanting to avenge their sense of irrelevance. As AI comes for America’s jobs, I suspect there will be more and more of them hiding in the bushes in Florida and lurking at the edges of political rallies. If what Anthropic founder Dario Amodei said is true and, within one to five years, we will lose 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs, that’s a social earthquake. The 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail outside OpenAI founder Sam Altman’s San Francisco mansion, carrying a manifesto about our “impending extinction,” shows where the blame for our atomized society is heading. Tech is about to get its Unabomber moment. And that same bitterness is landing on the now-fearful, donor-dependent politicians who have failed either to legislate against the recklessness of Silicon Valley or to protect America from the heartless, ever-growing “K-shaped” economy.
Dame T,
Glad you made the after party!
Nice to know you're being followed by Camilla!
Yet, once again this hellion must digress.
Realizing 2018 seems a long time ago, yet it was a great year for the WHCD with Michelle Wolff, “I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV.”
“You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him.”
Wiser words have rarely been spoken by an American comedian about the current media creation in the Oval Office.
So this hellion will not shed a tear for those ducking under their tables who helped create the situation in the first place by turning a fifth rate New York City real estate developer into what we are bombarded with 24/7 by those folks that gave birth to him, the President of the United States.
His mendacity and illness is our mendacity and illness, due to a media that has been mainlining Trump into their financial veins for 10 years. Once a junkie, always a junkie, and that is what modern media has become with their drug known as Trump.
You look fabulous! What an honor for
us Americans that you were in the crowd. A savvy civilized journalist from the UK.