Following a ceremonial welcome by President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump to King Charles and Queen Camilla at the White House, the President delivered remarks from the South Lawn.
President Donald Trump:Thank you very much, everybody. What a beautiful British day this is. And it really is. Your Majesties, members of the British delegation, friends, service members, and distinguished guests, welcome to the beautiful White House. Great honor to have you. Melania and I will never forget the spectacular honor Your Majesties showed us during our extraordinary visit to Windsor Castle last September.
Now, it is our tremendous privilege to host you. And you’re going to have a wonderful— short stay, but stay nevertheless. Then you’re going over to Congress and you’re going to make a speech that’s going to make everybody very envious of that beautiful accent of yours. Very elegant. He’s a very elegant man.
Here in the shadows of monuments to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, honoring the British King might seem an ironic beginning to our celebration of 250 years of American independence. But in fact, no tribute could be more appropriate.
Long before Americans had a nation or a Constitution, we first had a culture, a character, and a creed. Before we ever proclaimed our independence, Americans carried within us the rarest of gifts: moral courage. And it came from a small but mighty kingdom from across the sea.
For nearly two centuries before the Revolution, this land was settled and forged by men, women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. Here, on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and the Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride. And that’s what it is— glory, destiny, and pride.
The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage.Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true.
In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea. But the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic. Fate drew a long arc from the meadow at Runnymede to the streets of Philadelphia that ran through the lives of people born and bred on the British code that no man should be denied either justice or right.
American patriots today can sing, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,” only because our colonial ancestors first sang “God Save the King.”
We see today a living symbol of this centuries-old bond just a few dozen feet to the left where I stand. There, Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth, an incredible woman who I had the privilege of getting to know, Queen Elizabeth II— very, very special woman who is very greatly missed on both sides of that mighty Atlantic— long ago planted a young tree. It was a very young and beautiful tree and look at it now.
Source: The Gateway Pundit
