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Wall Street hits back at GOP in ESG war

Wall Street giants are defending a widespread initiative to invest in companies with environmentally friendly policies, moving away from investment in the fossil fuel industry following attacks on the practice from GOP leaders.  

Asset management giant BlackRock wrote a letter to GOP states that are trying to curtail a social movement in the financial sector known as Environmental and Social Corporate Governance (ESG), which seeks to move the U.S. economy away from the fossil fuels that contribute to global temperature rise. 

Nineteen attorneys general, from mostly Republican-led states, penned a letter to BlackRock in August inquiring about its investment practices.  

The attorneys general said BlackRock is pursuing a political agenda instead of investing solely for the purpose of getting the best return on the company’s investments. 

“Rather than being a spectator betting on the game, Blackrock appears to have put on a quarterback jersey and actively taken the field,” they wrote. “Blackrock took voting action against 53 companies on climate issues, with 191 companies put on watch.” 

“While couched in language about long-term value, Blackrock’s alignment of engagement priorities with environmental and social goals … suggests at minimum a mixed motive,” they wrote. 

The firm responded that it favors companies that support the transition away from fossil fuels not because it’s pursuing a political agenda, but because these companies are a better long-term investment. 

“We believe investors and companies that take a forward-looking position with respect to climate risk and its implications for the energy transition will generate better long-term financial outcomes,” BlackRock said in a letter addressed to the attorneys general. 

The company said that the attorneys general were wrong about why BlackRock was participating in various ESG initiatives. 

“In managing our clients’ assets, BlackRock seeks to realize the best long-term financial results consistent with each client’s investment guidelines,” the company said. 

The Hill has reached out to the Arizona attorney general for comment on BlackRock’s response.  

The Texas state Senate also sent BlackRock a letter in August requesting documents about its ESG practices, which many in the state view as harmful to its economy. About a third of Texas GDP comes from the oil and gas sector. 

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink hasn’t shied away from the sociological side of the debate, and has argued repeatedly that capitalism has the ability to shape societies. 

BlackRock aside, other voices in corporate America are expressing anxiety about the ire the strategy has drawn from state governments.  

“How will these legislative trends affect the difficult corporate balancing act?” Cydney Posner, a lawyer in the public companies group of the law firm Cooley LLP, wrote in a Thursday blog post for the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. 

“As if it weren’t hard enough for companies to figure out whether and how to respond to social crises, now, another potent ingredient has been stirred into the mix: the actions of state and local governments — wielding the levers of government — to enact legislation or take executive action that targets companies that express public positions on sociopolitical issues or conduct their businesses in a manner disfavored by the government in power,” she wrote. 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen criticized long-standing assumptions about the relationship between government and big business in remarks delivered Thursday in Detroit. 

“The traditional approach to supply-side economics — which focuses on providing tax incentives to owners of capital in order to boost private investment — has, in many cases, contributed to deepening income and wealth disparities,” she said in her remarks. 

As an alternative, Yellen touted “the modern supply-side agenda” as “concerned with a broad range of productivity-boosting investments and with a broad distribution across sectors, people and places.” 

As an example, she cited new investments in a technology program from the Department of Commerce. 

“To spur regional economic development, the Commerce Department will establish at least 20 regional technology and innovation hubs. They will be geographically dispersed with priority for underserved and underrepresented communities. Such dispersal of economic opportunity across the country will mean good, new jobs in industries of the future,” she said. 

Her remarks built off a speech she delivered at the World Economic Forum in January, in which she advanced positions more often associated with the economic policies of the post-World War II period than the past several decades, which have seen trends toward globalization, financialization and deregulation in the private sector. 

“Our new approach is far more promising than the old supply side economics, which I see as having been a failed strategy for increasing growth,” she said. 

“Significant tax cuts on capital have not achieved their promised gains. And deregulation has a similarly poor track record in general and with respect to environmental policies — especially so with respect to curbing [greenhouse gas] emissions. Moreover, this approach has deepened disparities in income and wealth by shifting the burden of taxation away from capital and towards labor,” she said. 

Democrats’ recently passed Inflation Reduction Act enacted significant changes to U.S. tax and environmental policies in line with this agenda, including a 15 percent minimum tax on book income for large U.S. corporations and a tax on stock buybacks, as well as various measures to reduce U.S. carbon emissions. 

The legislation did little to increase taxes on wealthy taxpayers, despite numerous proposals including a tax on capital gains and a minimum income tax for billionaires. 

Republican strategists are not happy about the new policies or about Yellen’s ambitious language on potential new direction in the U.S. economy. 

“It’s beyond belief. Did she sleep through the Reagan years? Did she not compare the Reagan years to the Carter years? What does she think a tax on capital actually is?” longtime Republican anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist said in an interview. 

“When she pooh-poohs deregulation, she’s being a bad economist,” he said. “Look at the deregulation of the transportation sector under Reagan, which actually started under Carter, although Reagan gets most of the credit for it. That was a bipartisan success that brought prices for consumers way down.” 

Despite the new law and Yellen’s programmatic speech, economists are skeptical that the relationship between government and big business is fundamentally changing. 

University of Massachusetts economist Gerald Epstein suggested that if politicians don’t think social and environmental policies should be advanced by corporate boards, then the well-established practice of corporate lobbying on public legislation should be reconsidered as well. 

“If board rooms shouldn’t discuss these issues, should their companies be allowed to spend millions of dollars lobbying on public policy issues?” he said in an email to The Hill. 

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DOJ appeals special master ruling in Trump documents probe

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Thursday filed a notice of intent to appeal a ruling granting former President Trump’s request for a special master, asking the judge stay a ruling blocking its investigation.

“Without a stay, the government and public also will suffer irreparable harm from the undue delay to the criminal investigation,” the DOJ writes in its filing.

“Any delay poses significant concerns in the context of an investigation into the mishandling of classified records.”

Developing

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Biden on Queen Elizabeth: 'She defined an era'

President Biden and first lady Jill Biden honored Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday, calling her “a steadying presence” and “a stateswoman of unmatched dignity” following her death.

“In a world of constant change, she was a steadying presence and a source of comfort and pride for generations of Britons, including many who have never known their country without her. An enduring admiration for Queen Elizabeth II united people across the Commonwealth,” Biden said in a statement.

The queen died at the age of 96, ending the longest reign for a British head of state in history that included the administrations of 14 U.S. presidents. She died at Balmoral Castle, her Scottish estate, Buckingham Palace announced.

Biden had been briefed on the queen’s health earlier on Thursday and was receiving regular updates about her condition. The Bidens first met the queen in 1982 while on a Senate delegation trip to the U.K. and met with her in June 2021 when she hosted them during an overseas trip.

Biden, in his statement, commented that she deepened the special relationship between the U.S. and UK.

“Queen Elizabeth II was a stateswoman of unmatched dignity and constancy who deepened the bedrock Alliance between the United Kingdom and the United States. She helped make our relationship special,” he said.

“She helped Americans commemorate both the anniversary of the founding of Jamestown and the bicentennial of our independence. And she stood in solidarity with the United States during our darkest days after 9/11, when she poignantly reminded us that ‘Grief is the price we pay for love’,” he added.

Biden said he and the first lady look forward to a close relationship with the new King and Queen Consort and sent his condolences to their whole family. He spoke with British Prime Minister Liz Truss during a video call with other leaders earlier on Thursday and told her he was thinking of the queen.

“Her legacy will loom large in the pages of British history, and in the story of our world,” he said in his statement.

Biden noted that the queen led the U.K. through the COVID-19 pandemic and spoke about the personal connection people felt with her during her life of service.

“She was the first British monarch to whom people all around the world could feel a personal and immediate connection — whether they heard her on the radio as a young princess speaking to the children of the United Kingdom, or gathered around their televisions for her coronation, or watched her final Christmas speech or her Platinum Jubilee on their phones,” he said.

“And she, in turn, dedicated her whole life to their service,” he added.

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Officials say Bannon was 'architect' of defrauding scheme

Officials said Steve Bannon was the “architect” of a scheme to defraud donors who gave money to build a wall on the United States-Mexico border. 

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said at a press conference on Thursday that Bannon and the organization We Build the Wall, Inc., were indicted for a yearlong fundraising scheme that took in more than $15 million from thousands of people across the country based on false pretenses. 

He said Bannon and other leaders of the group promised that all donations to the organization would go toward building a wall on the country’s southern border and “not a penny” would go to paying the salary of the group’s president, Brian Kolfage. 

Bragg said the group’s fundraisers repeatedly used the phrase “not a penny” in soliciting donations through media appearances, emails and social media posts. 

But he said Kolfage received a salary of more than $250,000 that was funded by donations, and at least $140,000 of it was laundered by Bannon. Prosecutors also allege that Bannon used some funds to pay for personal expenses. 

Bragg said Bannon directed We Build the Wall to transfer tens of thousands of dollars at a time to a non-profit company throughout 2019. The company then paid Kolfage’s salary, which obscured the source of the funds, prosecutors allege. 

Bragg said prosecutors in New York began investigating Bannon after he received a pardon from former President Trump in January 2021 for federal charges he faced related in relation to the fundraising scheme. 

“We then began investigating and determined that Mr. Bannon must be held accountable in this jurisdiction, the jurisdiction of New York State, for his conduct as the architect of this scheme, which impacted hundreds of Manhattan residents,” he said. 

Bragg said Bannon and We Build the Wall are facing two counts of second-degree money laundering, two counts of fourth-degree conspiracy, one count of first-degree scheme to defraud and one count of fifth-degree conspiracy. 

Bannon has slammed the investigation as politically motivated, saying that “this is all about 60 days from the day,” referencing the upcoming November midterm elections. He said prosecutors did the “same thing” to him in August 2020 when he faced the federal charges shortly before the 2020 presidential election. 

Bragg said Bannon will be arraigned Thursday afternoon. 

Two other men, including Kolfage, pleaded guilty to charges related to the We Build the Wall project in April. A third defendant had a mistrial. 

New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) said at the press conference that the indictment is a result of joint efforts between her office and Bragg’s. 

“Today is an important day for justice, our justice system and our continued efforts to uphold the law,” she said. “Regular everyday Americans play by these rules, and yet too often, the powerful, political interest, they ignore these rules. They think that they are above the law.” 

James said Bannon was the “architect” of Trump’s plan to build a wall on the southern border, so he stole millions of dollars when he undertook a plan to fund the wall. 

“And the most egregious of them take advantage of hardworking Americans in the process, and Steve Bannon stands out as a perfect example of this blatant inequality,” she added.

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Operation London Bridge: Here's what happens after Queen Elizabeth's death

Queen Elizabeth II died on Thursday, ending her longest reign as the British head of state.

Her death set in motion “Operation London Bridge,” plans that have been put in place since the 1960s and revised regularly over decades.

Details about the plan have been revealed over the years shedding light on how the planned ten days between the queen’s death and her funeral will truly look.

The plan specifies the process for announcing the queen’s death, the period of official mourning in Britain and other nations tied to the British throne and for her funeral, according to documents seen by POLITICO last year.

The operation involves a variety of institutions, including the Church of England, Metropolitan Police Service, the British Armed Forces, the media, the Royal Parks, London boroughs, the Greater London Authority and Transport for London.

Elizabeth’s private secretary was designated to spread the news of her death, first to the prime minister, according to the report.

The call from the secretary to the prime minister would initiate a “call cascade” that informed senior parties of the queen’s death.

The prime minister will be the first government official to speak out about the queen’s death, and other officials were told to wait until those comments were delivered, according to the report.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s Global Response Centre will deliver the news to the Commonwealth countries where Elizabeth is queen.

The U.K. Parliament, as well as the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish parliaments, will convene for emergency meetings shortly after Elizabeth’s death, and the prime minister will address the House of Commons.

Charles, Prince of Wales, will ascend to King in a separate operation called Operation Spring Tide.

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, is next in line to the throne, followed by his three children Prince George of Cambridge, Princess Charlotte of Cambridge and Prince Louis of Cambridge.

King Charles will give a speech shortly after the death of his mother and government buildings will lower their flags to half-mast.

“There are really two things happening,” one of Charles’s advisors told The Guardian in 2017. “There is the demise of a sovereign and then there is the making of a king.”

The Accession Council will proclaim the new king the day following the queen’s death when they meet at St. James’s Palace, according to reports.

Parliament will swear allegiance to King Charles that evening before parliamentary activities are suspended for 10 days.

The Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments will proclaim the new monarch two days after the queen’s death.

King Charles will begin a tour of the United Kingdom three days after the queen’s death, visiting Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

The queen’s funeral is expected to be held 10 days after her death, on a Sunday, a time that will be solidified in British history as a National Day of Mourning.

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The aboriginal tragedy and the plague of untreated trauma

This week a 32-year-old aboriginal man on parole allegedly went on a stabbing rampage in Saskatchewan that killed 11 people and wounded 17. He died days later in police custody of self-inflicted injuries. This awful story illustrates how untreated trauma, caused by generational abuse and violence, lurks behind much of the world’s misery, from violent crimes to addiction, mistreatment of others and wars. It also illustrates the ongoing suffering of Native Americans and African Americans.

Intergenerational trauma is the transmission through families of the terrible effects of historical events, such as conquest, slavery, serfdom, exploitation, incarceration, holocaust or war.

Untreated, it can result in alcohol and substance abuse, broken relationships, destroyed families, domestic violence, child abuse, sexual abuse and violence or criminality. Aboriginals in Canada – as well as in the United States and Australia – have been victims on a mass scale because they were impoverished, defeated and traumatized by colonization and incarceration for generations.

African Americans suffer too as a result of slavery, abuse and racism over hundreds of years. In each case, individual or communal, the only “cure” is recognition and recovery through major psychological or social interventions.

The aboriginal Canadian man accused of murdering 11 innocent people in Saskatchewan is a case in point. Myles Sanderson was 32 and had been in trouble since he was 12. He never finished school and had been convicted of 59 crimes, including drunk driving, drug possession, assault, robbery and domestic abuse. Court records show that his childhood was characterized by neglect in homes where violence and substance abuse were normalized. He was diagnosed early on with post-traumatic stress disorder and at a recent parole board hearing said that regular use of drugs and hard alcohol would make him “lose (his) mind” and get angry. He was freed anyway, an unforgivable lapse on the part of authorities.

Canada, the U.S. and Australia each have sizeable aboriginal populations with chronic problems due to untreated mass traumatization. No amount of financial assistance makes a dent, only enlightened leadership helps.

Naturally, the overall statistics, in terms of human suffering, are depressingly high in all three countries. Each country destroyed tribal cultures, confiscated tribal lands (some returned or shared decades later), but, worst of all, placed generations of aboriginal children into residential homes, run by governments and churches, in an attempt to “assimilate” them into mainstream society.

Instead, many of the children were abused and permanently isolated from their families, traditional communities, languages and way of life. And when released, many felt rejected by white societies and often by their own communities.

“You store trauma if you don’t deal with it,” explains Catherine Twinn, a friend of mine and a lawyer from Alberta who has been an aboriginal activist, worked in government and continues to advocate on behalf of aboriginal causes. She served for several years in the Province of Alberta as a cabinet minister working on behalf of child welfare in the province. She said the experience was frustrating because the underlying problems are neither understood or dealt with by the communities or by governments.

“The majority of the populations on many reserves have FASD [Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders from exposure to alcohol before birth],” she continued. “These cause physical problems or problems with behavior and learning. Often a person with FASD has a mix of these problems. White people don’t talk about this — they don’t want to be accused of perpetuating negative stereotypes or of being racists.”

The aboriginal tragedy in all three countries is swept aside even though the statistics are shocking. Canada has only 1.67 million aboriginals (First Nations and Inuit) or roughly 4 percent of its population of 38.6 million. But aboriginals represent 32 percent of the male federal prison population and 48 percent of the female prison population. Despite considerable concern and fiscal support in Canada for aboriginals, one in four lives in poverty, and 40 percent of Canada’s indigenous children live in poverty.

The United States is no better. There are 2.64 million Native Americans. That’s less than 1 percent of a population of 329.5 million. But aboriginals represent 2.1 percent of all federally incarcerated people. A 2022 article in Quartz stated: “Nationally, American Indians are incarcerated at a rate 38 percent higher than the U.S. average for all groups, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. In 19 states, they are overrepresented in the prison population more than any other ethnic group.”

Australia has a similar problem. There are 798,400 aboriginals out of its population of 25.79 million, or 3 percent. And yet, 27 percent of those in prison are aboriginal. Comparing Canada with Australia, The Guardian quoted Canadian expert Jonathan Rudin, head of Aboriginal Legal Services of Canada: “Aboriginal peoples in Canada were grappling with record numbers of their children being placed in the child welfare system and a huge over-representation in the criminal justice system, but these are the same issues that faced Australia. …The reason it’s the same story is English settler colonialism works the same way, which is that you find a place with an indigenous population and then you destroy them as a people.”

Native residential schools in Canada and the U.S. were founded on the motto, “kill the Indian to save the man.” The U.S. Department of the Interior in 2021 issued a report that the federal government between 1819 and 1969 operated more than 400 schools in 37 states, and then-territories of Alaska and Hawaii.

In Australia, an estimated 10,500 children were forcibly removed and placed on missions to be trained as domestic servants between the late 1800s and the 1970s. In Canada, roughly 150,000 were placed in residential schools up until 1996. “Now we don’t have residential schools,” Rudin said. “What we have is child welfare, and when you graduate from child welfare, we have jails.”

Some individuals and communities have made “the recovery journey,” but the problem remains widespread and destroys the cultural and socio-economic systems within these aboriginal groups.

This week’s slaughter in Saskatchewan is another result of this dysfunction. Said Twinn: “Pain is passed down from generation to generation until someone is brave enough to feel it. I don’t think the general public is well informed on trauma and intergenerational trauma. This is not only about aboriginals. The King of Jordan used to host an international conference on trans-generational trauma in recognition of the fact that the Middle East population is a traumatized population. The same applies to Russia, where there are high rates of addiction of 40 percent of so. Russia is like a big reserve.”

Tragically, untreated trauma plagues humanity and exists everywhere.

Diane Francis is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington at its Eurasia Center. She is editor at large at National Post in Canada, a columnist with Kyiv Post, author of 10 books and specializes in geopolitics, white-collar crime, technology and business. She writes a newsletter about America twice weekly on Substack.

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Study finds possible link between stroke rates, refinery pollutants

Residential exposure to pollutants emitted by petroleum refineries could be related to the prevalence of stroke rates across the southern United States, a new study has found.

Living near petroleum production sites and refineries was potentially linked to 5.6 percent of strokes among adults surveyed in seven states across the region, according to the study, published on Thursday in Environmental Research Letters.

The process of refining petroleum, a common industry in the U.S. South, release multiple pollutants that researchers have previously connected to strokes.

But the authors of the new study sought to identify the direct relationship between residential exposure to petroleum refining and the development of strokes.

“The geographic concentration of economic sectors, and their associated by-products, is an underexplored, plausible risk factor for stroke,” lead author Honghyok Kim, who will be joining the University of Illinois at Chicago as an assistant professor this month, said in a statement. 

“By-products of petroleum production and refining include a mixture of pollutants that may impact the quality of adjacent air, soil, and potable water in residential areas,” Kim added.

To draw their conclusions, Kim and his colleagues at Yale, Brown and Seoul National universities combed through data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Population Level Analyses and Community Estimates for seven southern U.S. states.

They narrowed down the data to areas within 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) or 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) of petroleum refineries — zones strongly correlated with high levels of sulfur dioxide, a byproduct of the refining process.

Across these areas, the authors observed that the prevalence of self-reported stroke ranged from 0.4 percent to 12.7 percent, while people of lower socioeconomic status and of Hispanic ethnicity tended to reside closer to the refineries.

After analyzing the data, the scientists concluded that the percentage strokes potentially explained by residential exposure to petroleum refineries was about 5.6 percent — a total of 2,200 cases.

The results differed by state, with Mississippi showing the highest percentage — 11.7 percent — of strokes possibly linked to such exposure, according to the study.

Zooming in much more locally, the scientists found even more dramatic variations in results based on census tract. One tract in Texas showed the highest prevalence of strokes potentially explained by petroleum refineries, at 25.3 percent, according to the study. 

The authors also emphasized their observation that sociodemographic factors influenced the prevalence of strokes in each region, noting that those individuals of lower socioeconomic status were disproportionately affected.

This association with sociodemographic factors, they added, could “be relevant to understanding and addressing entrenched sociodemographic disparities in stroke outcomes.”

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DC mayor declares public emergency over busloads of migrants

Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) on Thursday declared a public emergency over busloads of migrants from Texas and Arizona arriving in the nation’s capital.

Bowser said she was creating a new Office of Migrant Services to assist with the emergency, estimating that 9,400 migrants have been bused to her city since April and hundreds more are expected this fall.

“What we’re dealing with is a big unknown, and it’s an unknown being imposed on us,” the mayor said at a Thursday morning press conference. “We’re not a border town.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) began busing migrants to Democratic cities over the spring, including New York City and Chicago, Ill.

The Republican governors are protesting the Biden administration’s border policies, which they say are too lax.

Inundated by the migrants, Bowser requested the assistance of the D.C. National Guard in both July and August but was rebuffed by the Pentagon, which called the request “inappropriate” in a letter reviewed by The Hill.

Bowser on Thursday said she was continuing a dialogue with the federal government on the issue, which she called a “political stunt.”

“This is a new challenge for DC, but I feel confident that if we lead with our values, and if we put the right systems in place, which we are doing with the Office of Migrant Services, then we will lead a response that makes our community proud,” she said in a statement.

A number of migrants shipped to D.C. are staying at the NoMa Hampton Inn, previously a COVID-19 quarantine hotel, with financial support from the government. Bowser said the hotel would continue to serve as a temporary housing shelter for migrant families.

The new Office of Migrant Services will cost an initial $10 million and is authorized by the public emergency declaration, although Bowser is seeking to establish a more permanent framework for the office with city council members and secure reimbursement from the federal government.

The office will work to meet the buses coming into the city, facilitate travel outside of D.C. for families who want to leave, and set up a “distinct” system to find housing and support other needs for migrants who want to stay.

Bowser said most migrants coming into the nation’s capitol have left the city, which she said makes clear that GOP governors are putting pressure on D.C. for political reasons.

“They are targeting Washington, D.C. — not because of any particular ties that the people boarding the buses have to Washington, D.C. — but they want to make a point to the federal government,” Bowser said.

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Queen Elizabeth, longest-serving British monarch, dies

Queen Elizabeth II has died at the age of 96, ending the longest reign for a British head of state in history, a staggering 70-year tenure that included the administrations of 14 U.S. presidents and a dramatic reshaping of the Commonwealth.

The queen “died peacefully” at Balmoral Castle, her Scottish estate, on Thursday, Buckingham Palace announced.

The news of Elizabeth’s death came just hours after Buckingham Palace had said that her doctors were “concerned for Her Majesty’s health” and that she was remaining under medical supervision. Earlier this week, Elizabeth had overseen the appointment of new British Prime Minister Liz Truss. But a virtual meeting the next day of the queen’s Privy Council was canceled after doctors advised her to rest.

The future queen took an unexpected path to the throne as a child, after her uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated and her father was proclaimed King George VI.

As a 21-year-old, the next in line to the British throne said in a radio address that she intended to dedicate her life to the role: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”

In 1952, at just 27, she became queen following her father’s death.

Her unprecedented reign included not just cultural and societal shifts, but changes to the British empire itself. When she was crowned, Britain had more than 70 territories overseas. Now, that number stands at 15, after Barbados removed Elizabeth as its head of state in December. 

Elizabeth gave birth to her eldest son and heir apparent, Prince Charles, in 1948. The queen and her husband, Prince Philip, went on to welcome three other children: Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward.

In her lifetime, the queen met with all but one of the American presidents, Lyndon Johnson, since Harry Truman. She delivered an address to a joint meeting of Congress, becoming the first British monarch to do so, in 1991. She met with President Biden in June for the first time since he entered office.

Though she rarely granted interviews, American political leaders often heaped praise on Elizabeth.

“I don’t think she’d be insulted, but she reminded me of my mother, the look of her and just the generosity,” Biden said after meeting with Elizabeth earlier this year.

Former first lady Michelle Obama wrote in her 2018 memoir that the queen was “warm and personable” when she met her and that the two bonded over their uncomfortable shoes.

“I confessed then to the Queen that my feet were hurting. She confessed that hers hurt, too. We looked at each other then with identical expressions, like, When is all this standing around with world leaders going to finally wrap up? And with this, she busted out with a fully charming laugh,” Obama wrote in “Becoming.”

Former President Trump said he shared a “great relationship” with the British monarch, saying during his 2019 visit to the United Kingdom that “her people said she hasn’t had so much fun in 25 years.”

In June, Elizabeth reached a historic milestone, with London playing host to a massive, four-day Platinum Jubilee celebration to mark the monarch’s 70 years on the throne.

The queen missed part of the extravaganza, a thanksgiving church service, after Buckingham Palace said she experienced “some discomfort” at Jubilee events. 

Following the spectacle, Elizabeth said in a statement that she was “inspired by the kindness, joy and kinship that has been so evident in recent days.”

“And I hope this renewed sense of togetherness will be felt for many years to come,” she said at the time.

Described as a private person in one of the world’s most public roles, Elizabeth — who was named Time magazine’s “Woman of the Year” in 1953 — became a cultural icon of sorts as queen. Countless performers have portrayed the monarch on television and the big screen: Helen Mirren won an Academy Award when she took on the title role in 2006’s “The Queen,” while Claire Foy and Olivia Colman both took home Emmy awards for their turns as Elizabeth in Netflix’s “The Crown.”  

She held the Guinness World Record for “most currencies featuring the same individual,” with her image appearing on the coins of at least 35 different countries.

Throughout the countless world events and elections she lived through, Elizabeth upheld the royal family’s protocol requiring its members to “remain strictly neutral with respect to political matters.”

She also remained a steady presence amid the scandalous storms, personal dramas, and tragedies that the royal family faced throughout her reign, including the 1997 death of her former daughter-in-law, Princess Diana, sexual assault allegations against Andrew and claims of racism.

Meghan, the duchess of Sussex, whose mother is Black and father is white and who is married to Elizabeth’s grandson Prince Harry, said in a 2021 interview that there were conversations within the royal family when she was pregnant about “how dark” the skin of her child would be. The couple later said neither Elizabeth nor Philip, who died last year at 99, made the skin tone comments.

In a rare move, Elizabeth took to the airwaves in the spring of 2020 to address her country in a rallying cry of sorts amid the increasingly deadly coronavirus pandemic.

“We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return,” she said at the time. “We will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.”

Updated at 1:47 p.m.

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