President Donald Trump meets Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday for the second ay of his state visit to Britain<\/b>
\nAfter the pomp, it\u2019s time for the politics.
President Donald Trump will meet Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday, the final day of the U.S. leader’s state visit to Britain, with tech investment, steel tariffs and potentially tricky topics on the agenda.
The president and first lady Melania Trump were feted by King Charles III and Queen Camilla on Wednesday at Windsor Castle with all the pageantry the monarchy can muster: gold-trimmed carriages, scarlet-clad soldiers, artillery salutes and a glittering banquet in a grand ceremonial hall.
British officials have festooned the trip with the kind of superlatives Trump revels in: It’s an \u201cunprecedented\u201d second state visit for the U.S. leader, featuring the biggest military honor guard ever assembled for such an occasion.
On Thursday it is Starmer\u2019s turn to welcome the president to Chequers, a 16th-century manor house northwest of London that serves as a rural retreat for British leaders.
Trump\u2019s British hosts want to celebrate the strength of the U.S-U.K. relationship, almost 250 years after its rocky start in 1776. Trump will be welcomed by ceremonial honor guard complete with bagpipers \u2014 a nod to the president\u2019s Scottish heritage \u2014 and shown items from the archive of wartime leader Winston Churchill, who coined the term \u201cspecial relationship\u201d for the bond between the U.S. and Britain.
There\u2019s also a lunch of Dover sole followed by key lime pie, and a display by the Red Devils army parachute team.
The two leaders are expected to sign a \u201ctech prosperity deal\u201d that U.K. officials say will bring thousands of jobs and billions in investment in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and nuclear energy.
It includes a U.K. arm of Stargate, a Trump-backed AI infrastructure project led by OpenAI, and a host of AI data centers around the U.K. American firms are announcing 31 billion pounds ($42 billion) investment in the U.K.\u2019s AI sector, including $30 billion from Microsoft for protects including Britain\u2019s largest supercomputer.
British officials say they have not agreed to scrap a digital services tax or water down internet regulation to get the deal, some details of which have yet to be announced.
The British government is learning that when it comes to deals with the U.S. administration, the devil is in the detail. In May, Starmer and Trump struck a trade agreement that reduced U.S. tariffs on Britain\u2019s key auto and aerospace industries.
But talks on slashing duties on steel and aluminum to zero from their current level of 25% have stalled, despite a promise in May that the issue would be settled within weeks.
The British Chambers of Commerce said failure to cut the tariffs would \u201cgreeted with dismay\u201d by the British steel industry.
Starmer wants a successful state visit to balance weeks of bad news that saw him lose not just an ambassador but Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner \u2013 who quit over a tax error on a home purchase \u2013 and a senior aide. Fourteen months after winning a landslide election victory, Starmer\u2019s government is struggling to kickstart Britains\u2019 sluggish economy and his Labour Party is lagging in the polls.
Leslie Vinjamuri, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said the trip was likely to be \u201ca difficult visit for the prime minister, much more so than for the U.S. president.\u201d
For Trump, \u201cthis plays well at home, it plays well abroad. It\u2019s almost entirely to President Trump\u2019s advantage to turn up to Britain and be celebrated by the British establishment,\u201d she said.
Starmer will be bracing for awkward questions about Jeffrey Epstein when he and Trump hold a press conference at Chequers. Days before the state visit, Starmer fired Britain\u2019s ambassador to the U.S., Peter Mandelson, over the envoy\u2019s past friendship with the convicted sex offender.
Questions about Epstein overshadowed Trump’s last visit to the U.K. in July, when he sat with Starmer at his golf club in Scotland. As they took questions from journalists, Trump was repeatedly peppered with queries about Epstein as his government faced pressure from back home to release government records into the criminal case of the now-disgraced financier, who authorities say killed himself in 2019.
There are also potentially difficult conversations to be had over Ukraine and the Middle East.
Starmer has played a major part in European efforts to shore up U.S. support for Ukraine. Trump has expressed frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin but has not made good on threats to impose new sanctions on Russia for shunning peace negotiations. He has repeatedly pushed off a decision, suggesting more than once that action will come in a few weeks. As he left Washington for the U.K. on Tuesday, Trump appeared to put the onus on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, saying, \u201cHe’s going to have to make a deal.\u201d
Last week\u2019s Russian drone incursion into NATO member Poland drew strong condemnation from European NATO allies, and pledges of more planes and troops for the bloc\u2019s eastern flank. Trump played down the incident\u2019s severity, musing that it \u201c could have been a mistake. \u201d
Starmer also departs from Trump over Israel\u2019s war in Gaza, and has said the U.K. will formally recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations later this month.
Trump has threatened to penalize Canada during trade negotiations for making a similar move.<\/p>\n