President Donald Trump would not have taken Prince Harry and Meghan Markle back, he told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, saying he is pleased the couple has traded California for the English countryside. Executives from the U.S. travel industry were meeting with the president when he delivered that verdict, one week on from the return of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to Britain.

“I’m happy about it. I was not a fan,” Trump said, adding that he thought the pair “treated the royal family with great disrespect.”

The duchess drew his sharpest words. “I didn’t like the way she acted,” the 80-year-old president said. “I thought she was terribly disrespectful to the Queen, to King Charles.” Both monarchs, he said, had been well known to him. He then conceded that the palace might not share his gut feeling: “Maybe I’m different; I would not have taken them back. If I were the royal family, I would not have taken them back.”

The comments touched off an on-air row on ITV’s “Good Morning Britain,” where presenters Richard Madeley and Kate Garraway hosted commentators Sarah Vine and Ava-Santina Evans. Vine said on the show: “I think that’s the one moment where everyone, even people who don’t like Donald Trump, will sort of quite like Donald Trump. Because I think that’s generally the prevailing view, actually.”

Evans rejected that argument as “hubristic,” pointing to ICE agents in the U.S. pursuing people based on skin color despite their legal status, and she criticized Trump for saying he would not have welcomed Meghan Markle back. “I don’t want to be over moralistic here, but I do think we’ve lost the sense of statesmanship,” she added.

A media insider said of the segment: “It was always going to be explosive because Trump, Harry and Meghan are three subjects guaranteed to divide viewers. But Sarah effectively suggesting that even Trump’s opponents could unite behind his criticism of the Sussexes poured gasoline on the debate. The reaction was immediate, and there has been uproar about her opinions.”

From Montecito to the Cotswolds

The Sussexes landed in Britain on August 26, drawing a line under six years in California. That American chapter opened in 2020, when the two stepped back from senior royal duties following years of unrelenting scrutiny from the British tabloids. Their landing place was Montecito, an affluent coastal pocket of Santa Barbara County, where the couple purchased a private home and built out a portfolio spanning media production, commercial deals and charitable work; the results varied from venture to venture.

Security concerns have kept the details of the new home private, though the couple is understood to be living in a non-royal residence outside London. Reports have identified the Cotswolds, a region where the pair have long-standing ties, as the search area. Places at an unnamed school await their children for the new term — Prince Archie, seven, will enter Year 3 and Princess Lilibet, five, Year 1 — while neither parent, reports say, is expected to resume official royal work. 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.

A friend of King Charles III said the monarch quietly urged Harry to come home, believing the royal family is stronger when it stands together. Harry has appeared to mend ties with his father, who is battling cancer, during recent trips to Britain. His brother, Prince William, and William’s wife, Catherine, Princess of Wales, remain estranged from him, reports indicate.

A Feud That Goes Back a Decade

Both sides have traded hostility, and the bad blood predates Meghan’s arrival in the royal family. The actress was playing Rachel Zane on the legal series “Suits” when, during the 2016 campaign, she called Trump misogynistic and divisive 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 told Larry Wilmore, the program’s host.

Three years on, in the run-up to his June 2019 state visit to Britain in his first term, The Sun told Trump about those comments, and he replied, “No, I didn’t know that she was nasty.” He later insisted he had “never called Meghan Markle ‘nasty,’” calling it “made up by the Fake News Media.” The question went unresolved by the recording, an Associated Press fact check concluded, since his sentence can be read as attaching the word to her remarks rather than to her.

Trump announced in March 2020, after reports emerged that the Sussexes were moving to the United States, that the bill for their security would not fall to American taxpayers, and he said the couple would have to fund it themselves. A spokesperson for the duke and duchess answered at the time that no security resources from the U.S. government had ever been sought by them, and that privately funded arrangements were already in place.

Barbs, Ballots and Afghanistan

Meghan waded back in later that year during an online voter-participation event. She urged Americans there to cast ballots, warning that complacency amounts to complicity. She left the president unnamed. Royal convention bars family members from voting and keeps the sovereign 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 2021, Trump said, “I’m not a fan of hers. I wasn’t from day one. I think Harry has been used horribly,” and he added that the prince’s relationship with his family had been ruined by it. The question of deporting Harry over the drug use described in the memoir “Spare” came to Trump in 2025; he said he would leave him alone because the duke already had enough problems at home. In April 2026, asked about Harry’s call at the Kyiv Security Forum for the United States to help end the war in Ukraine, the president said the prince was not speaking for the United Kingdom, inquired how his wife was doing and asked that his regards be passed along.

Harry has largely avoided naming the president, but he pushed back in January 2026 over a Fox News interview in which Trump said of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies in Afghanistan: “They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan. And they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.” The British government rebuked the remark, noting that 457 British personnel died in the conflict. “Their sacrifice and that of other NATO forces was made in the service of collective security and in response to an attack on our ally,” a spokesman for Prime Minister Keir Starmer said at the time. The prince served a decade in the British military and completed two tours in Afghanistan. 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.