A feature of living at the end of an era is that some events in the present already feel like future artefacts – things you expect to see in a school history book, or a documentary many years from now. Here is King Charles’s 2026 state visit to the United States, right between the chapters on the war on Iran and the global energy crisis. Here is an image of the entire constellation of Trumpland, dining on spring-herbed ravioli and dover sole. Look at this interesting antiquity of the time: the gold plates, the universal sign of a regime at the peak of excess. And there you see the foreign dignitary, making a speech that at the time felt like bold truth-telling, but as we all now know was little more than naive theatre while the whole world teetered on the precipice.

The cast of characters behind the era-ending crisis were present, helpfully concentrated in one place to illustrate to those in the future how it came to this, and by whose hands. The money men, the Lord Haw-Haws, the nepo babies, the quislings. Seven guests from Fox News, seven members of the Trump family, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and – a little treat for golf-loving Trump – the Masters champion, Rory McIlroy, who the president made stand up to show off, breaking away from his state address to say: “Congratulations! Very proud of you.” If you wanted a snapshot of the forces that underpin the Trump administration, indifferent to its colossal violations, here it was – billionaire-funded corporate media, big tech, private equity and stars just happy to be so close to so much power.

One of the most jarring things about crisis is how much carries on as normal, how American power retains such a massive gravitational pull that even as Trump engages in all manner of unhinged behaviour or threatens to wipe out an entire civilisation, the cosy protocols of state respect and friendliness continue.

And goodness, weren’t some glad for it – for the chance to believe, for a moment, that the White House had not been driven into the gutter. The next day, almost the entire front section of the New York Times website was dedicated to the visit, to the king’s jokes and decorum, to the menu, the guest list and Charles’s itinerary. And look at our precious bipartisanship! Resuscitated once again for a glimpse as the king is welcomed, like a household where a warring couple puts on a united front for company, and it can appear for an evening that they are not terminally irreconcilable.

And what well-played “subtle rebuttals” from the king. To those in the UK who constantly worry that the special relationship is withering, fret not, because in one regard, the US will still take your calls. A wealthy old monarchy, the most famous in the world, can still confer some credibility on a country long departed from its rule. One with a political establishment that prided itself on becoming a democratic behemoth in only 250 years, undergirded by a constitution and the separation of powers – yet one that is now a place in which the president is locked in battle with the judiciary and launches wars over the legislature’s head. One previously swaddled in the rhetoric of a shining city on a hill and the norms of polite elite convention, but which is now steeped in indignity, suspicion of insider trading, hooliganism and blood.

But the royal visit was also an exercise in mutual rehabilitation for two countries journeying into the unknown, clinging on to past glories. It already feels like a vestige because both institutions, the presidency and the monarchy, are at a nadir. The context is both unavoidable and extremely necessary to avoid. A whole class of people tarred by associations with Jeffrey Epstein. A scandal that continues to lap at the front doors of the presidency and has already claimed a prince and the UK ambassador to the US, and still threatens in its reverberations to bring down the British prime minister. When treading on such context, one certainly has to be very subtle indeed.

Support for the monarchy is at a historic low, particularly among young people. Trump’s approval rating has sunk to the lowest of his current term. The two countries, outside the disillusionments with their elected and unelected leaderships, hurtle into uncertain futures, with no serious opposition to Trump in sight and a Labour government on the ropes. As nations, the US and the UK squat on the legacies and reputations and treasures of the past.

There was something both pathetic and understandable about the eagerness to cling on to these remnants. In the UK papers, Charles was declared to have delivered a “masterclass in diplomacy”, defended Nato in a “historic address” and re-forged the special relationship. Even the Europeans got swept away, with Le Monde announcing that Charles had given Trump a “lesson in democracy”, on a visit that “carries symbolic weight for all Europeans committed to the rule of law and the preservation of balanced ties with the US”.

It is hard to reckon with the reality that so many ships have sailed: that neither Europe nor the UK has any sort of influence on Trump; that the rule of law has been shredded not only by the US president, but by a genocide in Gaza that these lofty superiors either sanctioned or let pass. Charles was not a sage representative of an old viable civilisation to a new one that had lost its mind, but an emissary of those still unable to recognise how much a combination of their own failings and unchallenged US hegemony has called time on their rules-based order.

What comes next? The trajectory is towards more trouble, rather than tranquility; the possibility of an extended war on Iran and further Middle East destabilisation, global energy shocks, perhaps even the unravelling of Nato and the breakdown of American democracy itself. Which is why this royal visit feels like a beat in a narrative, a cliffhanger that observers in the future will see as a moment when it was clear that something was ending and no one at the time knew it. I do not blame those rejuvenated by the time a European king made it believable for a precious instant that sanity and stability were still within reach. Go for it, I say. Hold on to it, remember it. Because the chapter is coming to an end.

• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist