Kimmel says King Charles may help steer Trump visit positively

Jimmy Kimmel seized on the royal optics of Donald Trump’s second state visit to Britain, arguing that King Charles III was “one of the very few people who might actually be able to tip things even slightly in a positive direction.” The line captured why the moment landed: not as simple celebrity banter, but as a political reading of a president whose relationship with the British monarchy has become a recurring cultural and diplomatic spectacle.

Trump’s September 2025 trip was billed as the largest state visit ever granted to a U.S. president by the United Kingdom. At Windsor Castle on Sept. 17, King Charles III greeted Trump and first lady Melania Trump in a tightly choreographed welcome that mixed ceremony with hard politics. Trump later paid a private tribute at Queen Elizabeth II’s tomb, a gesture that added solemnity to a visit already designed to project continuity and alliance.

The pageantry did not erase the friction around the trip. Coverage at the time noted protests in Britain over Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein, underscoring how the state visit unfolded under a cloud of public skepticism. Trump also met Prime Minister Keir Starmer at Chequers during the same trip, reinforcing the official purpose of the visit even as the spectacle around it dominated attention. In that setting, Kimmel’s line about Charles suggested that the monarchy still carries a kind of soft power that can shape the tone of transatlantic politics, even if only at the margins.

Kimmel’s comments fit a broader pattern of using monologues and special television appearances to attack Trump and cast his political moment as corrosive. In Channel 4’s 2025 Alternative Christmas Message, Kimmel said, “We won, the president lost,” and described “tyranny” as “booming” in the United States. He also faced a temporary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! in September 2025 after comments tied to the Charlie Kirk assassination, part of a larger wave of backlash that has repeatedly followed late-night political comedy in the Trump era.

That context helps explain why Kimmel’s royal commentary resonated. The joke was not really about monarchy as tradition, but about monarchy as one of the few institutions still seen as capable of moderating a politics built on spectacle, grievance and confrontation. In Kimmel’s telling, King Charles was not a solution, just a rare stabilizing force in a visit that exposed how closely diplomacy, symbolism and televised satire now overlap.