White House lawn speeches greeting foreign heads of state are usually sleepy pro-forma affairs, filled out with the clichés of long-standing ties and mutual interests. But President Trump’s speech welcoming King Charles was no mere boilerplate. It was a masterpiece of ironic and subtle mischief on multiple levels—triggering the Left, offering a ground of unity for the Right as we draw near to the 250th anniversary of the American Founding, and, for those who listened closely, a rebuke both to Britain and the rest of Europe for their supine and rapidly declining civilizations. Making all the “No Kings” protestors look silly was just a bonus.
As everyone knows—especially Pope Leo XIV—Trump is not typically known for subtle rebukes, so kudos are deserved for his speechwriting staff for crafting a succinct and enthymematic message worthy of Aristotle, though it was fully in accord with Trump’s main instincts and central purposes.
There were two notable aspects of Trump’s speech. First, while the old idea of “fusionism” is out of fashion among conservatives nowadays, Trump embraced a fusion of sorts between the “creedal” view of American identity (think Locke) emphasizing universal natural rights, and the historical school that sees the American Founding as a matter of continuity with the English (and Protestant) tradition rather than a clear break with or advance from it (think Burke).
These approaches to understanding America and the Declaration of Independence are stubbornly dug in, each with their strengths and weaknesses, and each reluctant to yield an inch to the other. Attempts to synthesize the universal aspects of political philosophy with their historically contingent realization, culminating in democratic constitutionalism, are rare. But even Harry Jaffa, usually celebrated (or attacked) for being a champion of a creedal understanding of the Founding, allowed that the great achievement of the American Founding might have been due ultimately to Divine Providence.
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