For a President and a King, the View From the Top Is Curiously Similar
The two men — the American president and the British king — waited decades for their dream jobs, projecting a sense of normalcy and unity when they finally reached their thrones. They both prefer to ditch executive palaces for their respective retreats. And they share a passion for confronting threats to the environment.
The men, the 80-year-old President Biden and the 74-year-old King Charles III, are also united by their challenges. They both face a public increasingly dubious of their institutions. And they both battle skepticism over whether they are the right people to lead the increasingly diverse groups over which they preside.
“As older men in the pinnacle of their careers, they need to redefine what it means to be an older person,” said Arianne Chernock, a professor of history at Boston University and scholar of modern Britain, adding, “They need to find new ways to connect with a younger multicultural generation.”
That common ground served as the backdrop for the meeting between the president and the king on Monday at Windsor Castle, near London, where the two discussed clean-energy investment and efforts to combat climate change in developing nations. They are issues that Charles has been warning about since the 1970s and that Mr. Biden has made a central focus of his presidency.
Source: The New York Times
