King Charles arrives for visit with Trump to highlight nations’ “special relationship.” Here’s what to know.

Washington — King Charles III and Queen Camilla arrived in the U.S. on Monday for their first visit as monarchs. The trip, marking the 250th anniversary of signing of the Declaration of Independence, comes at a fraught time for the U.S.-U.K. relationship.

It’s not clear how their plans may be affected by additional security considerations after Saturday night’s attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where the president, vice president and Cabinet members were in attendance. In a statement Sunday, the palace confirmed that the visit “will proceed as planned,” adding, “The King and Queen are most grateful to all those who have worked at pace to ensure this remains the case and are looking forward to the visit getting underway.”

The king and Mr. Trump are seeking to strengthen and signify their countries’ ties at a time when the U.S. war with Iran and the president’s derision of NATO threaten to undermine the “special relationship” the two allies have treasured since World War II. 

“The visit will be an opportunity to recognise the shared history of our two nations; the breadth of the economic, security and cultural relationship that has developed since then; and the deep people-to-people connections which unite communities,” the palace said.

Charles and Camilla’s visit will feature the usual trappings of visiting royalty: meetings at the White House, an address to Congress and a state dinner hosted by the president. The two are also expected to head to New York on Tuesday to honor the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and then make a stop in Virginia.

King Charles’ schedule in the U.S.

The king and queen arrived in Washington on Monday afternoon. They’ll have a private tea with the president and first lady and then attend a garden party. 

They’re being welcomed with a formal ceremony featuring a ceremonial military review. The king and Mr. Trump will hold a bilateral meeting while the queen and first lady have their own meeting. 

On Tuesday, the king will address a joint meeting of Congress, and then a traditional state dinner takes place that evening at the White House.

Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he will be curious to hear what the king says in his address to lawmakers. 

“I expect the speech to be at a rather high-level and my expectation is that it will be somewhat historical — acknowledging the United States came from a revolution against his country, but then how we’ve sort of overcome that,” Bergmann said. 

The question will be, he added, whether the king hints at issues like human rights and freedoms that the U.S. and U.K. supported together after World War II, and whether the king leans into those principles in a way that might be seen as critical of the current administration.

The tense timing of the visit 

Many Britons, like other Europeans, have been critical of the way Mr. Trump is handling his presidency, and the British public don’t want their leaders to be “supplicants,” said Bergmann. While Bergmann said his “baseline sense is this is going to be kind of a feel-good trip” focused on the historical ties of the two nations, Charles has a delicate role to play.

“He’s got some fine thread and he has to thread it through a very very fine needle,” Bergmann said. 

Mr. Trump has been highly critical of U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s reluctance to join the U.S.-Israeli war effort or fight for the Strait of Hormuz, even as the U.K. has allowed the U.S. to use its bases for defensive operations. The president has also mocked the U.K.’s aircraft carriers as “toys.” 

Mr. Trump told the BBC in a phone interview this week that his relationship with Starmer will only “recover” if Starmer reverses course on what Mr. Trump views as lax immigration policy. 

Mr. Trump has expressed widespread frustration with NATO for the alliance’s refusal to join in the effort against Iran, which began with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Feb. 28. Mr. Trump has even raised the possibility of leaving NATO, of which the U.S. and U.K. are founding members. 

Liana Fix, senior fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the U.S.-U.K. relationship “has significantly deteriorated since the early days when Starmer was considered a ‘Trump whisperer.’ 

“The U.K.’s initial reluctance to allow the use of bases for the Iran war has strained not only Trumpists in D.C. but also the relationship with NATO, and undermined what was left of the belief in a special relationship,” she said. 

Still, Charles is not Starmer, and has a more stately and less political role to play, Bergmann said.

Most Britons aren’t viewing the king’s trip favorably. A YouGov survey in late March found that 49% of the British public said the visit should be canceled, compared with 33% who said it should go ahead. 

Simon Tisdall, a foreign affairs commentator for The Guardian, wrote that the king should speak plainly about Mr. Trump in his address to Congress. In a piece titled, “Protocol be damned,” Tisdall wrote that what he called Starmer’s “appeasement policy” has “miserably failed.” 

“Trump will undoubtedly portray Charles’s attendance at a separate White House state banquet as a royal endorsement of his person and policies,” Tisdall wrote. “And it is precisely this galling prospect of a presidential propaganda coup that has led most people in Britain to oppose the visit. Starmer, in contrast, hopes it will set the badly soiled ‘special relationship’ back on track.”

The relationship between Charles and Trump

Charles’ mother, Queen Elizabeth II, was adept at keeping peace with Mr. Trump during his first term, using her diplomatic skills honed through decades on the throne. Charles has also had plenty of practice in the area of diplomacy, Bergmann said. 

Though this is his first visit as king, it will be far from the first meeting for the two. Mr. Trump has called Charles a “friend.”

Mr. Trump told the BBC this week he thinks the king’s visit could help repair U.S.-U.K. relations.

“Absolutely,” the president said. “He’s fantastic. He’s a fantastic man. Absolutely the answer is yes.”

“I know him well, I’ve known him for years,” Mr. Trump told the BBC. “He’s a brave man, and he’s a great man. They would absolutely be a positive.”

It’s not clear exactly when they first met, but it was more than two decades ago, when Mr. Trump was a businessman in New York society. Photos show Melania and Donald Trump chatting with Charles at an event at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2005. 

More formally, the president and first lady visited with him in the U.K. in 2019, when Charles was still the Prince of Wales. The Trumps visited again in September 2025, attending an elaborate state dinner hosted by the king and queen at Windsor Castle. 

Mr. Trump expressed his sympathy for the king after the king’s brother, Andrew, was arrested on suspicion of public misconduct in office related to revelations from the Epstein files. The king had already stripped Andrew of his royal titles due to his connections to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Mr. Trump called the situation with Andrew a “very sad thing.” 

Charles’ last official visit to Washington was in 2015, while he was still prince, when he and Camilla met with the Obamas.