When King Charles overcame obsessive encounter with one US president long before Trump

By all accounts, King Charles played a magnificent host to Donald Trump over his three day state visit this week.

Since Trump’s fondness for the royal family is no secret, he is now adamant about hosting them in America, recently confirmed by White House sources.

If the King is to prepare for a trip across the pond, as guest to a particularly royal obsessed American head of state, it just so happens that he may be aware of what exactly such an engagement entails.

Prince & president

Charles, then the newly crowned Prince of Wales, was invited to the US by President Richard Nixon in 1970.

Accompanied by Princess Anne, the siblings were given a reception befitting their royal status — the Prince, just a tad more so.

While the Princess Royal gave the American press a hard time with her indifferent attitude, receiving the cruel nickname “Princess Sourpuss”, her brother was doing swimmingly well in public, guided by a special host.

Matchmaker Nixon

President Nixon accepted an invitation to have lunch with Queen Elizabeth in 1969 and when he first met the future king of England, he set his sights firmly on his royal target.

“When Nixon shook hands with Charles, he told him, ‘Both of my daughters follow you very closely’,” wrote David Charter in his book, Royal Audience.

While one of those daughters, Julie Nixon, was recently wed at the time, the president was eager to pair off the other one, Tricia Nixon, with his royal guest.

After touching down in the US for his three day trip, Charles was regularly seen with his agemate Tricia — LIFE Magazine reported that the pair took in the sights of Washington, a baseball game, and a formal dinner together.

At the dinner in particular, the two “laughed and danced” while the president “never looked happier”.

Fleeting amusement

Though Nixon was quite hopeful and serious about the pairing, Charles was able to read the situation and was only just rather “amused” by it.

“He even later joked about how Nixon was trying to marry him off to Tricia. It was several days of him being paired off with Tricia,” Charter recounted in his book.

And it seems like the current monarch has still not forgotten the encounter which left him tickled years ago.

After hailing “the close ties between the British and American peoples” during his address at Trump’s state banquet, King Charles amusingly recalled, “In fact, had the media succeeded in the 1970s in their own attempt at deepening the special relationship, I myself might have been married off within the Nixon family!”