President Donald Trump says he is glad Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have traded California for the English countryside — and that if the choice had been his, the royal family would not have taken them back. The president delivered that verdict to reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, during a meeting with U.S. travel executives, days after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex returned to Britain.
“I was happy about it. I was not a fan,” Trump said, charging that the pair had shown the monarchy profound disrespect.
His harshest criticism was reserved for the duchess. Trump said her conduct did not sit well with him and described the way she had treated Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III as badly disrespectful. The 80-year-old president implied the palace had been too lenient, while conceding that he himself might simply take a different view.
From Montecito to the Cotswolds
The Sussexes returned to Britain last week, ending six years in California — an American chapter that opened in 2020, when the pair walked away from senior royal duties after years of relentless attention from the British tabloids. In Montecito, a wealthy seaside enclave in Santa Barbara County, they purchased a private home and assembled a mix of media production, commercial and charitable ventures whose success proved uneven.
Reports suggest they are now searching for a private property in the rural Cotswolds, outside London. Their children — Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five — have been signed up to start the autumn term at a British school nearby, and neither parent is expected to take up official royal work again, according to reports. Talk that Meghan had entered preliminary discussions about joining the next season of “The Gentlemen” has faded, with the possible casting said to have been dropped.
According to a friend of King Charles III, the monarch quietly urged Harry to come home because he believes the royal family is stronger when it stands together. During recent trips to Britain, Harry has appeared to mend ties with his father, who is battling cancer, though reports indicate he remains estranged from his brother, Prince William, and William’s wife, Catherine, Princess of Wales.
A Feud That Goes Back a Decade
The hostility flows in both directions, and it began before Meghan ever joined the royal family. During the 2016 campaign, the actress — at the time playing Rachel Zane on the legal series “Suits” — called Trump misogynistic and divisive during an appearance on “The Nightly Show,” signaling that her vote would go to his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“Trump has made it easy to see that you don’t really want that kind of world that he’s painting,” she said to Larry Wilmore, who hosted the program.
Three years on, ahead of a 2019 state visit to Britain in his first term, Trump was questioned about those comments by The Sun and replied that he hadn’t known she was nasty. He later insisted on X that he had never applied the word to the duchess, accusing the media of inventing it — even though the remark was clearly audible on a recording of the interview.
When reports emerged in March 2020 that the Sussexes were moving to the United States, Trump announced that the bill for their security would not fall to American taxpayers and said the couple would have to fund it themselves. A spokesperson for the duke and duchess responded at the time that they had never intended to seek security resources from the U.S. government and that privately funded arrangements were already in place.
Barbs, Ballots and Afghanistan
Later that year Meghan re-entered the fray, turning up unannounced at former First Lady Michelle Obama’s “When All Women Vote” online event, where she pressed Americans to cast ballots and cautioned that complacency amounts to complicity. The president went unnamed. Under royal convention, family members abstain from voting and the sovereign stays politically neutral; Meghan, an American citizen, would have been legally free to vote, whereas Harry, who holds no U.S. citizenship, would not.
Speaking with Nigel Farage in a 2021 GB News interview, Trump said he had never been a fan of the duchess and argued that Harry had been badly used, which had damaged the prince’s relationships with his own family. In 2025, asked whether he would consider deporting Harry over the drug use described in the memoir “Spare,” Trump said he would leave him alone because the duke already had enough problems at home. Asked last year about Harry’s plea for the United States to help end the war in Ukraine, the president inquired how the prince and his wife were doing, then sarcastically asked that his regards be passed along.
Harry has largely avoided naming the president, but he pushed back earlier this year after Trump was widely criticized for claiming that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies had stayed a little back from the front line in Afghanistan. The prince, who served a decade in the British military and completed two tours there, said the sacrifices of NATO troops deserved to be described honestly and respectfully. For now, the Sussexes are settling into a quieter life in the English countryside, with no working royal roles on the horizon and no sign that the president intends to soften his assessment.