Amid the pomp, circumstance, and occasional rhetorical infelicities of King Charles III’s welcome to the White House on Tuesday, President Donald Trump delivered vitally important truths about America’s roots in British culture.

Trump said, “The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs of a majestic inheritance. … 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 in 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.”