March 10, 2025 (EIRNS)—British officials in Washington were told last week that U.S. President Donald Trump is now more distant from Britain, due to London’s public embrace of Ukraine’s Acting President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, following the well-publicized brawl on Feb. 28 with Trump and J.D. Vance and his dismissal from the White House. According to the U.K.’s March 8 Daily Mail, diplomatic sources in Washington say that Trump has “gone cool” on the U.K., due to King Charles’s public embrace and welcoming of Zelenskyy at his Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, a week ago.
They write: “Allies of the U.S. President have made clear to U.K. officials in America that pictures of the King with the Ukrainian leader made him feel ‘less special’ about the monarch’s invitation for a state visit to Britain.” They added that the U.K. officials’ response to Trump’s message was that “it would have been inappropriate for the government to ‘direct’ the King not to meet Mr. Zelenskyy.”
In a follow-up, the Daily Mail reported: “Last night, No. 10 said that it ‘did not recognize’ the claims that Mr. Trump was sulking over the meetings, but a well-placed source said: ‘Things definitely went a bit cool in Washington after Sandringham. We told them that the King makes his own decisions about who he meets'.... Whitehall sources were at pains to stress that the royal meeting was not a reaction to the Oval Office bust-up, insisting that it had been in the works for a while.”
Yesterday, MSN’s coverage, citing the Daily Mail, said that “tensions in U.S.-U.K. relations” were created by King Charles’s action. But it specified “Trump allies” as “Trump’s staff” and described the U.K.’s response as telling the staff “that the King could not be dictated to.”
