Trump’s state visit gets down to business as he heads to meet Starmer

U.S. President Donald Trump is due to leave Windsor Castle, where he and his wife Melania received the royal treatment on Wednesday — as the U.S. leader’s historic state visit to the U.K. turns to more serious business matters.

On Thursday, Trump will be heading to Chequers, the official country residence of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, for trade and geopolitical talks with the British leader and delegations from the U.K. and U.S. Melania Trump is due to stay on at Windsor Castle this morning.

Trump will be greeted by Starmer and his wife Victoria, along with another ceremonial guard of honor and bagpipers, when he arrives at Chequers — a 16th-century manor house near London that prime ministers use as a rural retreat and more informal venue for international diplomacy.

Finalizing commitments laid out in the “economic prosperity deal” or U.S.-U.K. trade deal of May are expected to take center stage, as well as more thorny matters regarding 25% tariffs on British steel and aluminum that the U.K. wants reduced to zero. The ongoing wars in Ukraine and Middle East are also likely to feature on the agenda.

Speaking to reporters as he boarded Air Force One to travel to Britain on Tuesday, Trump said he was “into helping” the U.K. finesse the countries’ trade deal.

“They want to see if they can refine the trade deal a little bit,” he said “We’ve made a deal, and it’s a great deal, and I’m into helping them,” he said at the time. “They’d like to see if they could get a little bit better deal. So, we’ll talk to them.”

On Thursday, the U.S. president and U.K. PM will join British Finance Minister Rachel Reeves for a business reception before giving a joint press conference later in the day.

The state visit has already yielded fruit for the U.K., with £150 billion ($204 billion) worth of inward investment announced in the run-up to and during the trip. The British government hailed the investments on Wednesday, stating that these deals would “boost jobs, drive growth and deliver opportunity for working people up and down the country.”

What could be key to day three of the state visit is that Starmer and Trump appear to truly get on. Just why that’s the case— when the two men have such different political backgrounds and perspectives — continues to defy logic.

“The Donald Trump-Keir Starmer friendship is an unlike an unlikely pair. Starmer is a center left human rights lawyer, Donald Trump, being the way that we know he is, what defines their relationship is a bit mysterious,” Tina Fordham, founder at Fordham Global Foresight, told CNBC on Thursday.

“I’m going to put it in terms of ‘soft power’ and all of Trump’s positive associations [with the U.K.]. Trump doesn’t have very many friends on the global stage that are from the left. And it’s better than than the alternative [of the leaders not getting on],” she said.

While it’s uncertain how the Thursday talks will play out, there’s no doubt that the U.K. has pulled out the stops to impress its transatlantic ally.

At a glittering state banquet held at Windsor Castle on Wednesday night, Trump told a swathe of guests that included senior royals, top U.S. and British officials and business leaders, that being invited to Britain for an unprecedented second state visit was one of the “highest honors of my life.”

He then raised a few laughs when he joked that he hoped he’d be the only president to get two state visits.

King Charles, in his own speech, praised the U.S. president’s “personal commitment to finding solutions to some of the world’s most intractable conflicts.”

Trumps otherwise basked in the royal limelight on Wednesday, visibly enjoying the pomp and ceremony, which included a royal gun salute, carriage procession through Windsor and guard of honor. Taken with the raft of investments, “it’s been a pretty flawless last 24 hours,” Duncan Edwards, the CEO of BritishAmerican Business, a transatlantic business networking group, told CNBC Thursday.

“From a U.K. government perspective, they couldn’t really have asked for a better slew of announcements coming over the last three days with the civil nuclear, financial services and all the AI announcements,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.”

Edwards cautioned that “promised dollars” were not the same as “actual dollars” and that it remained to be seen whether the investments promised over the last few days actually materialize.

“You just need to watch what happens over the next months and years what actually gets committed,” he said.