King Charles III delivers his speech as US President Donald Trump and Catherine, Princess of Wales listen during the State Banquet at Windsor Castle. Photo / Getty Images
As beggars’ banquets go, this one was pretty rich.
There they sat, side-by-side, some of the wealthiest, most influential and best-connected people in the world, all together at one long table inside a nearly thousand-year-old castle.
The guest of honour was in the middle of the table, wearing a white tie, looking happier than ever. He was being treated like a king by an actual king.
The state dinner that King Charles III hosted for President Donald Trump yesterday at Windsor Castle seemed like a new apex for Trump.
It was a glittering showcase of the powerful outdoing themselves to get (or remain) on the good side of a president whose second term has been marked by demonstrations of brute power.
Those demonstrations have increasingly taken the form of retribution against perceived enemies at home and tattered alliances abroad.
“The bond between our two nations is indeed a remarkable one,” said Charles. “In renewing our bond tonight, we do so with unshakeable trust in our friendship and in our shared commitment to independence and liberty.”
The President seemed supremely pleased by the whole thing; he didn’t look the least bit bothered when the King used his speech to gently prod about environmental issues and the need to support Ukraine.
Trump got up and cooed: “It’s a singular privilege to be the first American president welcomed here”.
Usually, these dinners happen at Buckingham Palace back in London, but that old pile is undergoing renovations. Besides, Trump has already had one state dinner there, the last time he was president.
And other US presidents have been welcomed at the castle — including Trump in his first term — albeit not at a state dinner.
Britain’s aim is clear: The royals were working in tandem with the British Government, lavishing attention and honours on the President so that he might be more pliable in negotiations with America’s oldest ally in his diplomatic meeting with the prime minister today.
But what about the rest of the table? There were 160 people sitting in that banquet room.
And 1452 pieces of cutlery, clanging and scraping in hands held by media barons, financiers, politicians and tech moguls. Peppered in between the power players were members of Trump’s Cabinet and most senior White House aides.
The seating chart ought to be kept inside the castle and studied another thousand years from now as a fascinating document about the history of the West.
This wasn’t a table of pop singers, movie stars, celebrities or fashion figures, whose company Trump has often sought. This was not about star power. It was about real power.
Britain’s Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was seated beside the New York financier and chief executive of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman.
Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan sat on that side of the table. So did Silicon Valley’s boy-king of artificial intelligence, Sam Altman, who was put beside Kemi Badenoch, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party. Demis Hassabis was there (he runs DeepMind, the secretive London AI lab owned by Google), and so was Satya Nadella, the top dog at Microsoft, and also Marc Benioff, the Salesforce cofounder. Tim Cook, the head of Apple, was there, too.
Cook’s presence in particular seemed notable. It was just a few weeks ago that he appeared in the Oval Office, with cameras rolling, to give a beaming Trump a piece of handmade Corning glass in a 24-karat golden stand.
It was a trophy meant to showcase his company’s investment in the US, but also to help patch up his relationship with Trump, who was irked when the Apple executive chose not to join his fellow tech titans in the Middle East last May for the President’s visit to the region. Trump took notice of Cook’s absence and publicly poked at him during two stops on the trip.
And so, there was Cook, seated beside Tiffany Trump in the banquet hall. Other than the first lady, Melania Trump, who sat between Queen Camilla and Prince William, Tiffany and her husband were the only Trump relatives in attendance.
Across the table from Cook and a few places to the right sat media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
He and Trump have a long and tangled on-again-off-again relationship. Things are definitely in the off mode at the moment.
A few months ago, the Wall Street Journal — the crown jewel of Murdoch’s newspaper empire — broke a story about Trump’s former friendship with deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, leading the President to deny the story and sue the paper and its owner.
Trump’s suit became especially personal; he demanded, successfully, that the 94-year-old Murdoch provide updates about his health after the President pushed for him to be deposed within a matter of days.
Murdoch’s position in the banquet hall was far enough down the table that he was out of the President’s field of vision, and yet, he was still there, sitting through a speech about Trump’s greatness.
Intriguingly, the newspaper baron was seated beside Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff and right-hand man who is taking a ton of heat in the media, most especially in the pages of — you guessed it — the Murdoch papers.
Even on this night of maximum acquiescence, Trump’s appetite for retribution was not sated.
After the dinner was over, he posted gleefully on social media about how ABC had pulled the comedian and Trump-critic Jimmy Kimmel’s show off the air indefinitely.
He also posted that he was designating the “Antifa” movement as “A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANISATION.” He did this all while he was preparing to spend the night inside the castle.
Windsor Castle is often described as the oldest and largest inhabited castle in the world, in almost continuous use since William I built it up in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest in 1066.
There is a moat and thick stone walls and a maze of rooms. The soaring banquet hall contains the shields of the Knights of the Garter dating back to 1348. Polished suits of armour look down on the dining table from plinths carved into the walls.
Outside those castle gates, Trump must return to a world that does not necessarily see him — or at least, will not necessarily treat him — the same way that the mighty men and women gathered at Windsor Castle did.
Last week, when the President left the White House to have his first dinner out in Washington since his comeback, he got screamed at inside a restaurant by a band of protesters who, while supporting the Gaza Strip, compared him to Adolf Hitler. They were tossed out.
Still, in Britain, the night before the state dinner, protesters beamed images of Trump socialising with Epstein onto the walls of the castle, a reminder of the political furore that awaits him back home.
After all, fortresses are designed to keep the world out. And no banquet lasts forever.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Shawn McCreesh and Maggie Haberman
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