Donald Trump Reveals Queen Elizabeth’s Hidden Pain Over Harry and Meghan: ‘She Was Stunned’
The president tells journalist Susan Page what he saw behind the Queen's composure—and why he believes the Sussexes broke her heart.
The late Queen Elizabeth II took many secrets to her grave. According to Donald Trump, one of them was exactly how much Prince Harry and Meghan Markle had broken her heart. In a new book, US President Donald Trump pulled back the curtain on a series of private conversations with the late Queen—and the picture that emerges is one of a monarch who said very little but felt a lot. And the reason behind it was the Sussexes, whose departure from royal life Trump believes, wounded the Queen far more deeply than she ever let on.
"I asked her about it constantly," Trump told journalist Susan Page, whose book The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History is published this week. "I'd say, 'Come on, tell me.' 'No, no. It's very nice.' Everybody was nice. She liked everybody." Tom Sykes, writing in The Royalist about the excerpt, flagged this as one of the book's most compelling passages—a window into the Queen's private pain, filtered through the singular lens of a man not exactly known for his own diplomatic restraint. Trump told Page he saw straight through the deflection. "She would always say, 'No, no, would be lovely, lovely,'" he said. "But it wasn't lovely, and I think it hurt her. I really think it hurt her. It was tremendous dissension, and I just don't think they treated her with the respect that she should have, frankly."
He went further. "I actually told her I couldn't do what she does, because she was very cool on the subject," Trump said. "She would talk about it but never said anything bad about either of them, and I think she loved Harry, really loved Harry. But Harry's been, I feel, led astray. I really do. I think he's been terribly led astray."
Sykes noted that, if one removes the bravado, what remains is a president saying the Queen was devastated by her own grandson. "It's just so disrespectful the way that happened, and she didn't deserve that," Trump told Page. "This is a woman whom everybody respected so much. I think she was stunned by what was happening, actually. She couldn't believe it in real time." The Sussex revelations are not the only bombshells Sykes flags in his coverage of the book.
Sykes also detailed the Queen's private views on Brexit. Page wrote in the book that during a private lunch with Barack Obama on April 22, 2016, the day after her 90th birthday, the Queen made her feelings known. Obama told Page she had effectively asked why a prime minister who understood politics would call a public referendum on a matter of such consequence without knowing the result. Obama said he was surprised by her candor—and that it was the only time she had ever commented directly on British politics to him.
Sykes also notes that Trump was, by his own admission, utterly enchanted by the Queen—and repeatedly tried to get her to say something she shouldn't. He pushed her for her favorite president and prime minister and suggested it must have been Churchill. Each time, she deflected. "No, no, no. He was wonderful, Winston. But they were all so good. They worked so hard." Trump's ultimate conclusion was that, "I couldn't get her to say a bad thing about anybody."
