Every Briton was flattered, including this one. Among this column’s perennial themes is that the distinctive features of the American republic — representative government, localism, and, above all, the primacy of the individual — had originated on the far side of the Atlantic.

Finding themselves in a sparse land, with neither an aristocracy nor an episcopacy to trouble them, the settlers were able to give their habits freer rein than in their ancestral archipelago. French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville thought that Americans were Englishmen left to themselves. Or, as Trump put it, “Here on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride.”

Do his feelings feed into a more Anglophile foreign policy? No. His tariffs on Britain, while lower than those raised against the European Union, were still more aggressive than anything done by Presidents Joe Biden or Barack Obama. The week before the state visit, a leaked Pentagon email had suggested that the United States might back Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands as punishment for Britain’s reluctance to join the war on Iran — a war that Britain had cautioned against launching on grounds that it would not topple the regime, a prediction that has sadly so far proved correct.

That email served to unite every British party leader against Trump. It was not just resentment that the U.S. presumed to pass territory among sovereign countries as if they were satrapies. It was a sense that, as in Ukraine, the U.S. had lost its moral bearings. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, President Ronald Reagan saw the attack for what it was: unprovoked aggression by an autocratic regime against a peaceful English-speaking population. In 2013, to put the issue beyond doubt, Falklanders held a referendum and voted by 99.8% (on a turnout of 92%) to remain British.

Is this not precisely the culture, the character, and the creed that Trump speaks of? Does the U.S. not have a natural sympathy with self-determination? Does the president feel no kinship with other British settlers in the Western Hemisphere?

Evidently not. Few countries have been on the receiving end of more presidential belittling and threats than Canada. In an act of gentle diplomacy, the king reminded the president that, as heads of state, they were co-hosting the forthcoming FIFA World Cup. Still, no one in Canada believes that the unhesitating pro-Americanism of the past 100 years is coming back.

No, I think we are seeing something else. As the white population of the U.S. declines in proportionate terms, ethnic identity within that population is growing. The percentage of white Americans fell from 85% in 1960 to 60% in 2020, and is projected to drop below 50% in the early 2040s. That alone is evidently making people who previously identified simply as Americans now think of themselves as white Americans.

The same is even more true of Americans of English or Scottish descent, who make up around half of the white population. Interestingly, that proportion is growing, as people who previously called themselves Americans are now owning their ancestry — something they never needed to do before.

There is an exchange in the 2006 movie, The Good Shepherd, where a mobster played by Joe Pesci is talking to a CIA agent played by Matt Damon:

“We Italians, we got our families and we got the church; the Irish, they have the homeland; the Jews their tradition; the n*****s, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?”

“The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”

DAN HANNAN: WHEN CHARLES III MEETS KING DONALD

Well, not anymore. A few years after that film came out, identity politics spilled off campus into the general population, culminating in the deranged Black Lives Matter summer of 2020. Repeatedly told to think of themselves in ethnic terms, some white Americans are doing precisely that, albeit in a way that must horrify the wokesters.

That is what was on display in the White House. Not a renewal of the Atlantic alliance, for Trump does not do alliances. Rather, the moment when the ethnic politics of the largest group of Americans went mainstream.