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This week’s Across the Pond felt like a culmination episode, and not just because it coincided with King Charles III crossing the Atlantic. The timing was remarkable: before the King delivered what amounted to a defense of democratic values to a joint session of Congress, Donald Trump embedded blood and soil rhetoric into his own welcome remarks that barely anyone caught in real time. But James and I caught it.
We spent the bulk of this episode doing what I think we do best: going deep on the things other people are moving past. The white nationalist language in Trump’s welcome speech. The systematic way King Charles rebutted every core Trump position without once saying his name. The historical through line from Nixon’s Southern strategy to what Trump is doing now. And what the United Kingdom’s increasingly impossible diplomatic position looks like when the president is threatening to hand Argentina the Falkland Islands as punishment for Britain staying out of the Iran War.
It was a wide-ranging conversation you won’t want to miss.
Watch the full conversation above and read the key takeaways below.
The Speech No One Was Talking About
While everyone focused on King Charles’s congressional address, Trump’s remarks at the welcome ceremony contained language that should have set off immediate alarms. I caught it in real time and was genuinely surprised by how little pickup it got on cable.
Trump said that for nearly two centuries before the revolution, this land was “settled and forged by men who bore their souls and the blood and noble spirit of British” blood. The explicit invocation of British blood as the foundational substance of America is not a rhetorical flourish. It is ethno-nationalist language with a specific ideological lineage.
He then described America as a “wild, untamed continent” that was settled by people who “let loose the ancient English love of liberty.” The erasure of Indigenous peoples, reduced to a savage backdrop against which European civilization heroically arrived, is not accidental. It is a core feature of white nationalist historical revisionism.
The line that hit hardest: Trump said the veins of the founding generation “ran with Anglo-Saxon courage.” Anglo-Saxon is not a neutral historical descriptor in this context. As James pointed out, in Europe that language is taught in schools as textbook Nazi and fascist rhetoric. The only political movements in Europe that invoke Anglo-Saxon identity as a political category are the far right, the AFD in Germany, and white supremacist organizations like the KKK, which organized specifically around White Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity.
Trump then struck down the idea that America is “merely an idea,” echoing almost verbatim what J.D. Vance said in his Claremont Institute speech last year: “America is not just an idea. It’s a particular place with particular people and a particular way of life.” The Claremont Institute speech set off alarms among people attuned to white supremacist rhetoric at the time. Trump saying the same thing from the White House welcoming podium should have set off the same alarms.
We flagged that this is almost certainly Stephen Miller’s fingerprints. The purpose of this rhetoric is not just to excite the base. It is to build an intellectual and ideological framework that justifies the denaturalization of foreign-born citizens, mass deportation, and a fundamental redefinition of who counts as American. The language precedes and enables the policy.
I noted that Trump appeared to be speaking not just to his domestic base but to the European far right, sending a signal of kinship after the Orbán loss in Hungary. The blood and soil framing is a transnational far-right calling card, and its deployment during a royal visit was a calculated message to allies like Nigel Farage and the broader European nationalist movement.
King Charles Condemned Trump Without Saying His Name
What made the King’s congressional speech remarkable was not just what he said. It was that almost every substantive point he made was a direct rebuttal to something Trump embodies.
On diversity: King Charles said, “In both our countries, it is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse, and free society that gives us our collective strength.” This is the precise opposite of the Christian nationalist, anti-diversity agenda the Trump administration has been pursuing. Coming from the head of a thousand-year-old monarchy, it landed as a rebuke that carried the weight of institutional history behind it.
On checks and balances: Charles cited the Magna Carta’s presence in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, and specifically highlighted its role as the foundation of the principle that “executive power is subject to checks and balances.” That line, landing in the context of an out-of-control President Trump, received a standing ovation from Democrats.
On the rule of law: Charles said the rule of law, the certainty of stable and accessible rules, and an independent judiciary resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice were foundational to shared prosperity. On the same day, Trump’s DOJ was charging former FBI Director James Comey in what I described as an obviously retaliatory prosecution. The contrast was not subtle. Trump attacks the judiciary constantly. The timing made Charles’s words feel like a live fact-check.
On NATO, Ukraine, and climate: Charles explicitly mentioned NATO by name, expressed support for Ukraine, and climate change. These are all things Trump has actively undermined. As James noted, because the King is not a politician and technically does not have politics, he can say these things in a way that makes them sound like settled facts rather than partisan positions. Trump cannot attack him for it without looking like he’s attacking indisputable truths.
James made a point I want to sit with: he said he never thought he would find himself agreeing with a monarch, but that Charles spoke Tuesday in ways no European leader could have. The fact that the most compelling defense of progressive democratic values in that room came from an unelected king rather than an elected president says everything about where American democracy is right now.
James also noted that King Charles’s military service came up in the speech, which served as an implicit contrast with Trump’s draft dodging. Not a direct attack, but a double-edged line that landed precisely because of who was sitting in the room.
Blood & Soil Is Not New — It’s The Southern Strategy Unmasked
Trump’s white nationalist rhetoric did not emerge from nowhere. I laid out the full historical through line because understanding where this comes from is essential to understanding why it is now combusting.
The Nixon Southern strategy was built on a simple transaction: feed white working-class grievances about Black and brown people taking their stuff, while actually governing for the wealthy. Lee Atwater, Nixon, Reagan with welfare queens, all of it was coded racial language designed to turn disaffected Southern Democrats into Republicans after the party lost the South by passing the Voting Rights Act.
Trump was the culmination of that strategy. He ripped the mask off entirely. He stopped coding it and started saying it out loud. Immigrants are taking your jobs. Black and brown people are responsible for your problems. And in exchange, the white working class was supposed to get something material in return.
What’s different now is that Trump is not delivering his side of that transaction. He raised their prices with tariffs. He started a war that made gas more expensive. He betrayed every promise he made on the Epstein files, on affordability, on no new wars. You can keep feeding people racial grievances for a while, but when they can see it is their president raising their prices rather than the immigrants he blamed, the con becomes visible.
I made the point that even Nick Fuentes, an avowed white nationalist, is now telling people to vote Democrat. Tucker Carlson, who pushed great replacement theory on Fox News for years, is speaking out against Trump. When you have lost the white supremacists, the blood and soil rhetoric is not a winning play. It is a desperate one.
I made the point that Reagan, the alleged hero of the modern right, gave his final speech in office as an ode to immigration. He said anyone could come to America and become an American. That was the foundational Republican position on national identity for decades. Trump’s administration has abandoned it entirely and replaced it with something that has a very specific historical name.
The UK’s Impossible Position & The Falklands Threat
James gave me the clearest window yet into how fragile the US-UK relationship actually is beneath the ceremonial surface of this visit.
A leaked Pentagon memo reported by Reuters revealed that as punishment for the UK’s refusal to join the Iran War, the Trump administration was considering supporting Argentina’s territorial claim on the Falkland Islands. James’s reaction was measured but clear: the idea that America would use a long-standing British territorial claim as a geopolitical bargaining chip to punish an ally for exercising sovereign foreign policy judgment is a fundamental departure from how alliances are supposed to work.
James noted that Britain could not have held the Falklands in the 1982 war without American support for Thatcher’s government. The threat to flip that support to Argentina’s Milei government, whom Trump has praised repeatedly, is not a small thing. It is a reminder that no alliance is safe when the other party treats relationships as purely transactional leverage.
The King Charles visit was, in James’s read, a deliberate deployment of Britain’s strongest diplomatic asset. Starmer has struggled to manage Trump. Charles carries a different kind of weight with Trump: the monarchy appeals to Trump’s obsession with status, glamour, and legitimacy. Sending the King was a strategic move to try to insulate the relationship from Trump’s volatility.
James also made a prediction: Keir Starmer may not be Prime Minister by September. If the May 7th elections in Scotland, Wales, and English local councils go as badly as expected for the Labour Party, the pressure on Starmer’s leadership could become untenable. Trump could soon have a new UK PM to contend with. Perhaps one that is tougher on him.
Bottom Line
Trump embedded blood and soil language into a royal welcome ceremony, and barely anyone flagged it. King Charles walked into Congress the same day and dismantled every core Trump position without once saying his name. James and I spent this episode making sure the record is clear on both counts.
The Southern strategy is combusting. The white nationalist rhetoric is a desperate play by a president who has failed to deliver on every material promise he made to his base. And the UK is navigating an alliance relationship with a president who is threatening to hand their territory to a rival as punishment for independent foreign policy decisions.
Democracy had an unusual champion this week. He wore a crown.
James is out there in Edinburgh fighting this fight. I am here in Brooklyn doing the same. Support independent journalism that tells the truth about what is happening. Subscribe to James Matthewson. If you have not yet become a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News, you can do that below. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot. Independent media runs on the people who back it.
