Tomorrow is the royal wedding! I’m going to be totally honest here, I am 100% getting up at the crack of dawn so I can watch the guests arrive. I have no particular interest in Prince Harry or Meghan Markle but I do love a good fascinator.

Anyway, to this morning’s reading:

• Of course there are tons of articles this morning about the wedding and What It Means. For example, Helen Castor (who wrote a great book about English queens before Elizabeth I, She-Wolves) argues in the New York Times that Markle is simply following in the bland, toothless footsteps of such royal brides as Blanche of Lancaster (who married John of Gaunt in 1359, and later became the mother of Henry IV), destined to symbolize power but never wield it:
  

  We’ve since made our peace with increasingly disempowered crowns resting on female heads: between them, Queens Victoria and Elizabeth II have sat on the British throne for 130 of the last 200 years. But, despite the embattled presence of Prime Minister Theresa May, a quick head count in the Houses of Parliament or the boardrooms of major corporations shows the problems we still have with the reality of women with actual power.

  Our newest royal bride, meanwhile, has already shut down her blog and deleted her Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts. From now on, even as her image becomes increasingly ubiquitous, her voice will be heard less and less. Like Blanche of Lancaster before her, Meghan Markle appears to know exactly what she’s letting herself in for, and all the indications are that she will do her job in the royal “Firm” with style and grace. We can wish her well and at the same time question the job description: the recent prominence of royal women might make for splendid pageantry, but when it comes to the story of gender and power, it’s the antithesis of real change.

  There are many other pieces about the wedding this morning, of course, one or two per outlet, and they’re all (to my mind) overthinking it. Sometimes a tiara is just a tiara.

• In the Washington Post, David Ignatius frets about the relationship between the United States and Europe, given that the U.S. has elevated a dangerous, unstable autocrat to its highest government position.
  

  Trump is so unpopular in Europe that defying him carries little political risk. On issues such as trade, climate change, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and global economic policy, the traditional centrist policy consensus has mostly held in Europe.

  The transatlantic divide on culture and values, once the bedrock of the alliance, is striking. Trump, with his braggadocio and vulgarity, seems almost a caricature of a rough, violent United States that many Europeans dislike. A poll last year by the Pew Research Center found that only 11 percent of Germans, for example, trusted Trump to do the right thing, compared with 86 percent for his predecessor, Barack Obama.

  Americans have taken European support for granted for so long that few analysts have examined what a real breach in the transatlantic alliance would look like. Maybe it’s time to consider the “what ifs.”

  Similarly, in the New York Times, Roger Cohen traces the cracks in the alliance to a “moral rot” at the center of the presidency:

  The deepest form of rot is the erosion of the distinction between truth and falsehood. Totalitarianism was one big lie perpetrated on human beings reduced to the often hopeless quest for survival in a fog.

  A universe where morality ceases is the one Trump is most comfortable in. “Mr. President, did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?” Trump’s answer, on April 5: “No, no.” Except, as the president clarified in a recent financial disclosure, he did know.

  This is Trump’s Ministry of Truth, the new American normal. It’s impossible to overstate the enormity of it. That’s why the Alliance is collapsing and Germany finds no basis for cooperation: Trump’s America stands for nothing. As Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, told recent graduates in a speech, going wobbly on the truth means “we go wobbly on America.”

• More about Trump. (Sometimes it’s hard to remember that for several years I went for hours, days even, without thinking about what the president was doing.) David Graham has a really interesting piece in the Atlantic about how Trump’s experience in real estate negotiations is affecting the way he conducts foreign policy:
  

  Were Kim Jong Un and Trump sitting down to try to hammer out a real-estate deal, the ramifications of a failure would likely be few. Trump could simply seek new opportunities elsewhere. That doesn’t work in diplomacy, though. It’s not as if the U.S. can simply move on to another rogue state and try to negotiate with them, since the North Korea problem would remain unsolved. A different mutation of the same dynamic has transpired with Iran. Trump has pulled out of the nuclear agreement with Tehran, but he continues to speak hopefully about striking a new and better deal, overlooking the damaging effects of a breach of trust on the first deal. One reason Kerry was so eager to strike an accord was his fear that failure would mean Iranian proliferation.

• And still more about Trump. In the New Republic, Sarah Jones takes down the Salena Zito/Brad Todd account of Trump’s 2016 campaign, The Great Revolt:
  

  “In the short span of a generation, the face and focus of the Democratic Party nationally has shifted from a glorification of the working-class ethos to multiculturalist militancy pushed by the Far Left of the party,” they argue.

  Considered against the Obama presidency in particular, the racial dimensions of their argument become clear: The Democratic Party got too black and brown, and abandoned white voters. It’s a familiar Trumpian dog whistle. As the party of minority rights, the Democrats have to accept they will lose some white voters. But they don’t need to lose these voters because they’ve fostered the perception that the party has gotten too rich—that it has become complicit in systemic inequalities. Still, the GOP has aligned itself completely with monied interests, and Trump embodies those interests.

  So why vote for Trump over any Democrat? It comes back to resentment. When voters feel precarious, they become susceptible to demagoguery. So Trump invents the bad hombre, just as the GOP once invented the welfare queen. It’s a con job, and it works partly because the middle class does have cause for resentment. Something does block its upward trajectory. But poor immigrants aren’t blocking anyone’s path; that credit belongs to the wealthy, like Donald Trump and his cabinet.