Last month, the King of England came to Congress and schooled us on what it means to be American. This would be hysterical if it wasn't so tragic.
To understand why, you need to understand two things happening inside our government right now.
The first is the unitary executive theory -- the idea that the president has sole, total control over every agency, every employee, every decision in the executive branch. Not leadership. Control. For most of our history this was fringe. Congress created independent agencies -- the Federal Reserve, the FDA, the National Weather Service -- precisely so expert, nonpartisan work could be insulated from whoever happened to be in office. Madison called the concentration of all powers in one set of hands "the very definition of tyranny."
But in February 2025, Trump signed an executive order declaring all federal agencies "must be supervised and controlled" by the president. Project 2025 laid the blueprint. Then came the purge: FTC commissioners fired, a Federal Reserve governor targeted, USAID dissolved, inspectors general removed, thousands of civil servants stripped of protections.What does this look like in your life? The National Weather Service lost roughly 600 people. Then on July 4, the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes and more than 130 people died across central Texas, including 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic. The administration's 2026 budget proposes eliminating the NOAA lab that developed key flash flood prediction tools. At the NIH, about 2,300 grants totaling $3.8 billion were terminated, affecting at least 383 clinical trials. The FDA lost nearly 4,000 employees. Foreign food inspections hit historic lows.
The second thing is a strain of nationalism, championed by Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony, that argues a nation isn't built on ideas like "all men are created equal" but on tribal bonds -- shared blood, language, religion, ancestry. Hazony's conferences feature regular speakers like JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Sen. Josh Hawley. This philosophy has entered the White House.
You can hear it when Trump calls immigrants people "poisoning the blood of our country." You can see it in ICE's transformation: at-large arrests up 600%, nearly 70,000 people in detention, two U.S. citizens shot dead by federal agents.
I know many of us have been told -- by the administration, by the news, by people we trust -- that immigrants are driving crime. I understand why that's frightening. But the data doesn't support it. Immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. The administration's own records confirm that the majority of people arrested in these operations have no criminal record. Because throughout history, when leaders need the public to accept an extraordinary expansion of power, they first have to make people afraid enough to let them.
Which brings me to this week. Trump welcomed King Charles to the White House and spoke of settlers who "bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British," of founders whose "veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage." He rejected the idea that America is "merely an idea."
King Charles told a different story. He called Congress "this citadel of democracy created to represent the voice of all American people." He said the founders "drew strength in diversity." He cited the Magna Carta -- the charter that established no one, not even a king, is above the law. He urged America to "ignore the clarion calls to become ever more inward-looking."
He was not being polite. He was sounding an alarm.
Then, apparently without irony, the White House posted a photo of the two men with the caption: "TWO KINGS."
This country was founded because we didn't want kings. The unitary executive seizes the power. The nationalism decides who it's used against. A real king came here and reminded Congress what makes nations strong. Our president stood in the same building and spoke of bloodlines and genetic inheritance.
I know which vision I recognize as American.
Sara Sharpe LaMance of Chattanooga is a writer, communication strategist and the founder of The Letters Project and STILL/WILD.
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.