Queen Elizabeth II charmed and cajoled a succession of American presidents. Then came one of her toughest challenges yet: Donald Trump.
She did her best to handle Trump, including overlooking a few of his royal protocol slights.
Now her successor, King Charles III, will face the same test this week during his first state visit to White House as Great Britain’s monarch, said Susan Page, author of “The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand that Shaped History.”
Page, Washington bureau chief for USA Today, shared stories from her book in a lively conversation with journalist Jerry Roberts, host of the podcast show “Newsmakers with JR.” The event was held at the CEC Hub in downtown Santa Barbara. About 75 people attended the gathering, sponsored by the News-Press, the Santa Barbara Literary Festival and Voice Magazine, which also featured a reception and book-signing.
Roberts and Page bantered on a variety of topics, including Elizabeth’s interactions with presidents such as Trump, Obama, Reagan, the ways she impacted U.S. policy, and her aversion to shaking hands or hugging people she greets.
Charles could not be arriving at a more consequential time, an age when relationships with the U.S. and other nations are evolving. Or as Page put it, we’re in a “kind of a pivot point” for the U.S. as Trump shakes up a world order that has largely stayed in place since the 1940s.
Just as Elizabeth had to navigate an American-led, post-war environment during her 70-year reign, Charles arrives as the world order is being reshuffled.
“I think we are moving into a world that will have a different sense of alliances and assumptions,” she said in response to Roberts, who read excerpts from her book, and took hand-written questions from the audience.
It’s unlikely there will be a reversion to the pre-Trump norm when the 47th president eventually leaves office.
“You can’t have such enormous change over a period of years…and then say, ‘Oh, never mind.’ Whoever succeeds Trump is going to face a world that is again being reshaped, maybe in a similar way to what we saw after World War II,” Page said.
Elizabeth, crowned in 1952, appeared on the world stage at the right time. Page said Elizabeth honed her abilities to exert “soft power” for the U.K. to exert influence even as the island nation was shedding its status as an empire.
“The queen didn’t just wear a tierra and go to dinners,” Page said. “She was consequential.”
With every successive administration. Elizabeth had to deal with various eccentricities and nuances as she both hosted and visited every American president leading up to her death at age 96 in 2022. While some were more challenging than others, handling Trump called for its own special approach. It helped that Trump believed that he and the queen had a unique relationship.
Among the standard protocols in dealing with Britain’s monarch—such as never touching them unless they extend a hand—it’s considered bad form to reveal any private conversations. Yet Trump, interviewed by Page for the book, didn’t hold back.
He told Page that he pressed Elizabeth to name her favorite U.S. president—not once but repeatedly.
“She would dodge the answer,” Page said. After the dinner, Trump was led to believe that her favorite president was, indeed, him.
That may or may not have been true. Elizabeth never disclosed if there was a single American leader that caught her fancy, although there were some with whom her attempts at making a connection never gelled, according to Page. One was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who entered the White House after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“LBJ was a failure for her,” Page said. Johnson, among the more earthy individuals to hold the nation’s highest office in the modern era, “didn’t like elites.”
Then there was Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, another complicated personality. Nixon’s presidency would become mired, and eventually sunk, by the Watergate scandal. Elizabeth appeared to have actively avoided Nixon. Her staff figured out dates in which Nixon would be likely wanting to schedule a state visit, then always found an excuse to say the queen was unavailable on those dates.
If there was one president in which the queen appeared to have developed a genuine rapport, it was Ronald Reagan. For starters, she was a movie buff, a plus in dealing with a former leading man on the silver screen. They also shared having to balance their private lives with the demands of constantly being on view to an eager public. The bigger bond was over love of horses. They exchanged private notes in which they talked extensively about favorite ponies and adventures on horseback.
When Elizabeth met Reagan at Santa Barbara Airport and visited his ranch in 1983, California was drenched by rain. A photo at the time showed an apparently tense Nancy Reagan beside President Reagan and the queen who both looked perfectly at ease, happy to be in each other’s company despite the dreary weather.
Despite snafus and miscues involving her visits through the years, one thing shined through.
“I do think she actually quite liked Americans,” Page said.
It’s yet to be revealed what Charles thinks.
