King Charles III arrives for a four-day state visit, two days after the President was rushed off a Hilton dance floor.

Hon. Two days after the President of the United States was rushed off a hotel ballroom floor by his Secret Service detail, the King of the United Kingdom arrived on the South Lawn. Light rain. Honor guard. The First Lady in a tasteful coat. Queen Camilla in something more pastel. The South Portico did its job. The Green Room did its job. The afternoon tea was set, the milk pitcher was on the tray, and the protocol staff, who had been preparing this visit for months, did not skip a step.

That, hon, is the news. The state visit, on its merits, is a successful state visit. Reagan would have run it the same way. Bush 41 would have run it the same way. Even Carter, who thought the British honored too many old wars, would have run it the same way.

The President and First Lady then took the King and Queen to see a new expanded beehive on the South Lawn, near the Kitchen Garden, in the shape of the White House itself. I want you to read that sentence again. In the shape of the White House. Somebody, hon, in the East Wing’s preserved-or-replacement workshop, built the beehive in the shape of the White House. The bees, presumably, do not have an opinion. The Queen, smiling, did not have an opinion. The King, who has spent twenty years opining about urban planning, did not have an opinion.

Pictures of the beehive went around the world by suppertime. The pictures are nice. The pictures are also, in the loose sense, the visit. The substance of the visit, which is the address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, will arrive in its own news cycle.

For one evening, on a Monday, the country looked very much like a country that has a state visit and a King and a Queen and a beehive shaped like a building. The country, on the Saturday before, looked very different. The protocol staff, hon, has been earning its money this April.

That ought to count.