Trump meets Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace to kick off state visit
President Trump and first lady Melania Trump met with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on Monday as the United Kingdom rolled out the red carpet for the commander-in-chief with a dazzling display of pomp and pageantry.
Trump and the first lady arrived by Marine One on the palace lawn and were welcomed by Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, on the first day of their state visit that will include a banquet hosted by the queen.
Charles escorted the Trumps to the palace’s West Terrace to meet the 93-year-old Elizabeth amid two 41-gun salutes from nearby Green Park and the Tower of London.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, watched the ceremony unfold from a palace balcony.
At the welcoming ceremony at the palace, Trump and Charles inspected the Guard of Honour as the national anthems of the US and the UK played.
Later in the afternoon, Trump and the first lady will travel to Westminster Abbey, where they will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.
The Trumps will return to Buckingham Palace in the evening to attend the state banquet hosted by Elizabeth.
They arrive during a period of turmoil as England struggles over how to leave the European Union and replace Prime Minister Theresa May, who announced she will step down Friday because of her inability to get Brexit legislation passed.
Trump has also roiled the atmosphere in a series of tweets and interviews in which he called Meghan Markle, the American-born Duchess of Sussex, “nasty” and compared London Mayor Sadiq Khan to “our dumb and incompetent Mayor of NYC, [Bill] de Blasio.”
The president was reacting to Khan’s comments in a newspaper column in which he called Trump “just one of the most egregious examples of a growing global threat” posed by far-right leaders around the world.
Khan argued that Trump doesn’t deserve a red-carpet welcome to England.
The president on Wednesday will head to Ireland, where he will stay at his golf resort in Doonberg before traveling to Normandy to mark the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion on Thursday.