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The most awkward thing to happen when King Charles visited President Nixon as a young man – it was 1970, the then-prince was 21 – was that officials kept wheeling out Nixon’s daughter, Tricia, to stand next to him at events. Since they were both single, on paper anyway (this was the same year Charles met Camilla), the optics were a little primitive. Here, you’re a young man; how about this young woman as a token of our esteem? I wasn’t alive, but if I know my mother, at least somewhere on Earth, someone was saying: “Tricia is a person, she’s not chattel.”

Visiting Ronald Reagan 11 years later, Charles was unaccountably handed a cup of tea with the bag still in it, and didn’t know where to put himself. Or the tea. Reagan was mortified, and still talking about it years later. You could split hairs about who was more at fault here: the tea-bringer or Charles himself, who met the occasion by merely staring at the tea. It would have been more courteous, surely, to fish out the teabag and drink it. Possibly, no one gave him a spoon; maybe they thought he always travelled with one, in his mouth.

Visiting the Clintons and the Bushes (all of them), nothing mortifying happened, and when Charles went to see Obama in 2015, and delivered a generalised rebuke to the world for its inaction on climate change, that might not have ticked all the boxes on the royal family’s bumper list of polite conversations, but history has already shown it to have been worth the etiquette breach. Which isn’t to say anything came of it – rather, that talking about things that matter is the only thing that puts the “power” into “soft power”.

Walking into Donald Trump’s White House, by contrast, which the king unaccountably still intends to do in two weeks’ time, will be fraught with conversational hazard. It will be the diplomatic equivalent of Catherine Zeta-Jones and the lasers in Entrapment, or to update that for fans of Celebrity Traitors, Joe Marler. Which is not to say that Charles isn’t nimble; just that the human agility doesn’t exist to make this relationship normal.

There’s a huge amount of simple insult that the king will have to ignore; Trump has slated our two “old broken-down aircraft carriers”, which on the one hand is fine, except they bear the names HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales. The president has insulted Keir Starmer in the most uncompromising terms; again, you could try to overlook this. He’s said no more than any given cab driver in the UK has done, plus all the other drivers, plus all the cyclists and pedestrians, but it will take some steely determination to keep civility aloft when a world leader has been mouthing off like any schmo in the street.

Is it a problem that Trump has been so stridently rude about the pope that US/pontiff relations have irrevocably broken down? Does Charles have particularly strong feelings about the pope? Will the king have been made aware of the AI image Trump posted over the weekend, in which he, Donald, is pictured as Jesus, healing the sick? The patient looks a bit like Jeffrey Epstein, but no time to read between the lines, there’s a lot going on. Five ghost soldiers, one of whom has four arms and a Statue of Liberty crown, fly behind the orange Godhead, like heavily militarised Tinker Bells. A nurse from the 1940s gazes into the distance, as another young woman prays to the president and his goodness. What was Trump actually saying with this image (which he has since deleted), and more importantly, what happens if he says it to King Charles’s face, which he definitely will, once he figures out what it is?

This is what’s happened as of Monday, and assumes that Trump stays absolutely silent, keeps off social media, bombs no further nations, and commandeers no straits between now and the end of April. Really, what are the chances?

It would be outlandish for the king to cancel this visit, historically unprecedented, a rip in the fabric of the Anglosphere. Self-evidently, though, the situation is already outlandish and without precedent. Someone – maybe Starmer? Could an equerry do it? – needs to give the king permission to state the obvious and pull out. Otherwise both these emperors will be wearing no clothes.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist