Election night is over and the result is clear: Donald Trump will become the 47th president of the United States. While MAGA fans delight, one couple in particular will be wondering exactly where this news will leave them.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have steered clear of endorsing any particular candidate, and instead issued a statement via the Archewell Foundation in September, which described voting as “a fundamental way to influence the fate of our communities. At The Archewell Foundation, we recognize that civic engagement, no matter one’s political party, is at the heart of a more just and equitable world.”
It’s safe to assume, however, that like much of Hollywood, the couple leans Democrat—meaning that they’re unlikely to welcome the election result with much joy, especially given Meghan’s public denouncement of Donald Trump in the past. In 2016, before she had even met (let alone married) Prince Harry, she told a US chat show that she found Trump to be “misogynistic” and “divisive,” adding that the prospect of him in the White House left her thinking, “I might just stay in Canada.” Two months later, she went on a date with the royal who would become her husband and, three months after that, Trump was voted into office.
As a member of the royal family, Meghan was—and is still—expected to remain politically neutral. But when the next election came around four years later, she and Harry appeared in a video, urging people to vote. Harry said that they should “reject hate speech, misinformation and online negativity” (which many believed at the time to be a thinly veiled swipe at Trump) while Meghan labelled the race “the most important election of our lifetime.”
Buckingham Palace later distanced itself from Harry’s comment, claiming that as he was no longer a working royal, his statements were made in “a personal capacity.” But the damage was done—in Trump’s eyes, at least. “I’m not a fan of hers,” the new president told reporters at a White House press briefing in 2020, making it clear that Meghan’s dislike for him was more than mutual. “I would say this—and she probably has heard that—I wish a lot of luck to Harry, because he’s going to need it.”
His view of Meghan and of her husband seemed no less dim at the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington earlier this year, during which Trump warned Harry that he would be “on his own” should he be voted into office once more. “I wouldn’t protect him,” he added. “He betrayed the Queen. He would be on his own if it was down to me.”
Trump was referencing the negative remarks Prince Harry made about the royal family in his memoir, Spare—which Trump, who has often expressed his admiration for the late Queen, is said to have found wholly unacceptable. The former president called Queen Elizabeth an “incredible lady” after his state visit to the UK in 2019, adding: “I feel I know her so well, and she certainly knows me very well right now, but we have a very good relationship also with the United Kingdom.” When Piers Morgan asked him in an interview about the trip, he revealed: “Well, I don’t want to speak for her, but I can tell you I liked her… I liked her a lot.”
So how could the new president make things difficult for the Sussexes? In the past, he has taken issue with other parts of Harry’s autobiography, in which the Prince admits to trying cocaine, marijuana, and magic mushrooms. “I’d experimented with them over the years, for fun, but now I’d begun to use them therapeutically,” he writes of psychedelics, adding of cocaine: “It wasn’t much fun, and it didn’t make me particularly happy, as it seemed to make everyone around me, but it did make me feel different, and that was the main goal.”
The revelations created some tension over Harry’s US visa, and resulted in a court case. The lawsuit brought by The Heritage Foundation was terminated after a secret ruling in September, but Trump was none too happy about the result. Of the Bidens’ approach to team Sussex, he said: “I think they have been too gracious to him after what he has done.”
Whether Trump could, or would, make trouble for the Sussexes remains to be seen. “The powers of the president are very formidable,” one renowned American lecturer on US constitutional history told The Telegraph, adding that he is “sure Trump will utilize them”—in perhaps unpredictable ways, such as reopening the visa investigation. A US journalist speculated to the same paper that Harry’s ”life could get very unpleasant should Trump decide he wants to follow through with this.”
What will happen now is anyone’s guess. But, like much of Hollywood’s liberal Left, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will likely be feeling very downcast today—and concerned about what the future might hold for them.
This article first appeared on Tatler.
The post What Will Donald Trump’s Presidency Mean for Prince Harry? appeared first on Glamour.
