People On Twitter Had A Lot Of Feelings About The Trumps Meeting Queen Elizabeth
It might be a sign that Friday the 13th is the date President Donald Trump was scheduled to meet another major world leader for the first time. The president and queen of the United Kingdom made acquaintance for the first time on Friday, and social media is abuzz with thoughts about the interaction. These tweets about Trump and Queen Elizabeth meeting are pretty harsh.
The Trumps arrived in the U.K. on Thursday, July 12 following a two-day visit to Brussels for the international North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit. As the president and first lady take in the sights in the area, notably, they'll largely be skirting the capital itself, where demonstrations in protest of Trump's visit are ongoing throughout the weekend.
It's worth noting that Trump is joined by first lady Melania in meeting the 92-year-old queen. Also on the docket for Trump's visit in the U.K. is a formal dinner with business leaders.
The three are scheduled to meet at Windsor Castle on Friday, where they will take in a parade and have tea. In a statement obtained by Politico about the scheduled visit, the palace said,
Her Majesty will welcome the President and the First Lady Melania Trump at the dais in the Quadrangle of the Castle. A Guard of Honour, formed of the Coldstream Guards, will give a Royal Salute and the U.S. national anthem will be played. President Trump will inspect the Guard of Honour before watching the military march past and will then join the Queen for tea with the First Lady.
On Twitter, before the meeting happened, users were already one step ahead of the scheduled meeting, projecting upon it their hopes, fears, and everything in between.
And once the meeting happened, people had all kinds of thoughts to share.
To be fair, the critical social media posts about the president aren't hard to understand given his track record with world leaders. Trump spent his time at the NATO summit making provocative remarks — and several flatly false claims — that deepened his ongoing rift with his global allies. Just last month, Trump broke with decorum by skipping out on entire portions of the G7 summit after spending the week attacking his counterparts Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron. To cap it off, after leaving early and imposing steep tariffs on his allies, Trump reverted back to his favorite platform to announce he'd be breaking from their joint agreement on trade.
Even before that, Trump's visits to world leaders in the past haven't always been pleasant. Setting aside his history of uncomfortable-looking handshakes, Trump upon meeting French first lady Brigitte Macron commented on her "figure."
As one user wondered aloud in a tweet, "Will Trump tell Queen Elizabeth a Me Too joke or just say something demeaning about her looks?" That Trump might say something about the queen's appearance, then, isn't beyond the realm of possibility.
The New Yorker also dug in with an article dedicated to the visit in its satirical Borowitz Report, joking that the queen would cancel her scheduled meeting due to a facetious case of bone spurs. "'We are sorry to have to cancel the engagement, but we feared that meeting Donald Trump would be most painful,' the Queen's statement read," writes Andy Borowitz, pretending to quote a royal spokesperson.
The queen has met 10 of the 11 U.S. presidents since taking the thrown, per TIME. The only president in that time not to pay Queen Elizabeth a visit was Lyndon B. Johnson, who only made state visits on the Asian continent.
Meeting a queen comes with quite a list of dos and don'ts, and the world is almost certainly watching to see whether the American president will uphold his predecessors' legacy in making an appropriate visit.
