Prince Harry has officially had the most awkward lunch of his life and it happened on Monday in London. Currently, President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, are in the UK for an official state visit. Monday’s schedule included Harry meeting with Queen Elizabeth II and Trump, although insiders knowledgeable in royal business were quick to remark this meeting and lunch were going to be awkward as heck.
That’s because, just prior to his arrival in the UK this week, Trump was asked by The Sun in a recorded interview what his thoughts were on Meghan’s 2016 comments about him. At the time, Meghan had not yet married into the royal family and spoke her opinions about then-presidential candidate Trump. During an interview on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, Meghan had called Trump “divisive” and “misogynistic.”
To this, Trump told The Sun, “I didn’t know that [she had said that]. No, I didn’t know that. No, I hope she is OK. I didn’t know that, no. So what can I say? No, I didn’t know that she was nasty.” Trump attempted to deny that he ever told The Sun these comments in a follow-up tweet.
https://twitter.com/MsV_M10/status/1135530404197224450
According to Express, royal expert Victoria Arbiter noted that Harry will be expected to “toe the line” during his visit with Trump as it’s expected for Harry to always remain politically neutral. In Arbiter’s words: “The Royal Family will be professional and duty bound. But Prince Harry will be going to a private lunch with the Queen on Monday with Donald Trump and the First Lady, how incredibly awkward this is going to be for Prince Harry. He will lay on his very best charm because that is what he has been raised to do, that is what he is required to do.”
We imagine this is going to be damn tough for Harry considering Trump has been nothing but consistently disrespectful to every important woman in his life up until this point. Queen Elizabeth II, his late mother Princess Diana of Wales, sister-in-law Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, have all been subjected in one way or another to Trump’s inappropriate comments or behavior recently.
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Trump has had choice words for other royal women in the past. In 2012, after paparazzi shots of a topless Kate sunbathing on vacation with William were published by French tabloid Closer, the then-reality TV personality blamed the duchess for the photos and ensuing scandal. Even though the photographs were taken without her consent, during a private moment with her husband, taken with a camera nearly a mile from where she was.
Kate Middleton is great–but she shouldn't be sunbathing in the nude–only herself to blame.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 17, 2012
Per the Huffington Post, Trump made awful remarks during a Howard Stern interview just months after Diana died in a car crash in Paris. At one point, Stern remarked, “Why do people think it’s egotistical of you to say you could’ve gotten with Lady Di? You could’ve gotten her, right? You could’ve nailed her?”
To this, Trump replied, “I think I could have,” before jokingly (although we find absolutely nothing funny about it) saying he’d have taken Diana to the doctor’s office for a “little check-up” to make sure she didn’t have HIV. The gross remark was likely in reference to Diana’s charitable efforts where she frequently worked and visited with people living with the disease. Her work helped change societal attitudes about people living with HIV/AIDS but to Trump in the late ’90s, it was nothing but cruel joke fodder.
Huffington Post also reminded us of comments Trump made in a different Stern interview, where it seemed that all he could focus on was remembering Diana physically and apparently not for all of the incredible humanitarian work she did during her lifetime: “I tell you what, I think she’s magnificent. Lady Di was truly a woman with great beauty. I’ve seen her a couple of times. She was really beautiful, and people didn’t realize that [she was] beautiful. She was supermodel beautiful. She had the height, she had the beauty, she had the skin, the whole thing.”
https://twitter.com/fawzianaqvi1/status/1135531124594216961
Its going to be weird for kids in future history classes if ww3 starts due to Harry giving Trump a slap for saying something about his wife or mum.
— The Moleslinger (@HolyMole) June 3, 2019
Arbiter did note that the expectation for Harry to power through this difficult meeting came with at least a few silver linings: “So I think yes [the royal family] are all sort of aware of Donald Trump and how he has put his foot in it on numerous occasions. But Harry is there to support his grandmother, he will also be there to say thank you to Melania Trump because she did lead the US team to Toronto in 2017 for the Invictus Games.”
Prince Harry was the picture of diplomacy during the royal lunch, even if Trump wasn’t.
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