President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, that the departure of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle from California for the English countryside pleases him. Were he in the royal family’s position, he added, the couple would not have been welcomed back. U.S. travel executives were meeting with the president when he delivered that verdict, a week on from the return of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to Britain.
“I was happy about it. I was not a fan,” Trump said, faulting the couple for having “treated the royal family with great disrespect.”
The duchess drew his sharpest words. “I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way she acted. I thought she was terribly disrespectful to the Queen and to King Charles,” the 80-year-old president said. Trump said he had known both monarchs well, then allowed that the palace might not share his instinct: “I don’t know, maybe I’m different. I wouldn’t have taken them back. Frankly, if I were the royal family, I would not have taken them back.”
Leaving Montecito for an Undisclosed Address
Harry and Meghan landed in Britain at Birmingham International Airport on August 26, with both children, after six years based in California. They have kept the Montecito house. That American chapter opened in 2020, when the pair walked away from senior royal duties following years of relentless attention from the British tabloids. They purchased a private home in Montecito, a wealthy seaside enclave in Santa Barbara County, and built out media production, commercial and charitable ventures whose success proved uneven.
All the couple has said about its new base is that it is a private, non-royal residence outside London, with no location given. Speculative reporting has pointed to the Cotswolds, where the family is said to be house-hunting, but no address has been confirmed, and reporting has placed the school the children have joined in Oxfordshire. Prince Archie, seven, is entering Year 3, while Princess Lilibet, five, starts Year 1. Neither parent is expected to take up official royal work again, according to reports.
Chatter about Meghan holding preliminary discussions to join the next season of Guy Ritchie’s “The Gentlemen” has faded. The Hollywood Reporter, relaying Tina Brown’s newsletter, reported on August 22 that she had been dropped from consideration — Brown wrote that “the backlash in the UK was so intense, it became untenable to go forward” — and Netflix declined to comment.
The king had “informally encouraged” Harry to return because he believes the royal family is stronger united, a friend of King Charles III told The Daily Beast. Reporting on the move said the king had been told in advance — one account dates it to August 16, 10 days before they arrived — and that William and Catherine, Prince and Princess of Wales, were informed as well. Harry has appeared to mend ties with his father on recent trips to Britain — the king is being treated for cancer diagnosed in 2024 — while his brother, Prince William, remains on tense terms with him.
A Decade of Bad Blood
Animosity between the president and Meghan runs both ways here, and it predates Meghan’s entry into the royal family. She was playing Rachel Zane on the legal series “Suits” during the 2016 campaign when she appeared on “The Nightly Show” and called Trump misogynistic and divisive, 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, the program’s host.
Three years later, in the run-up to his June 2019 state visit to Britain during his first term, The Sun relayed those comments to Trump, who 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.” An Associated Press fact check found the recording did not settle it: the sentence can be read as applying the word to her remarks rather than to her.
Trump responded to March 2020 reports that the Sussexes were moving to the United States by announcing that the bill for their security would not fall to American taxpayers and saying the pair would have to pay for it out of their own pockets. They had never intended to seek security resources from the U.S. government, a spokesperson for the duke and duchess responded at the time, adding that privately funded arrangements were already in place.
Ballots, Barbs and Afghanistan
Meghan waded back in later that year at an online voter-participation event, pressing Americans to cast ballots. “If you aren’t going out there and voting then you’re complicit,” she said at Michelle Obama’s When We All Vote couch party on August 20. “If you’re complacent, you’re complicit.” The president went unnamed. Royal convention keeps family members from voting and the sovereign politically neutral; as an American citizen, Meghan would have been legally free to vote, whereas Harry, who holds no U.S. citizenship, would not.
Speaking with Nigel Farage on GB News in December 2021, Trump said, “I’m not a fan of hers. I wasn’t from day one.” He added that he thought “Harry has been used horribly” and that the duke would one day regret it. Asked in 2025 whether he would consider deporting Harry over the drug use described in the memoir “Spare,” the president answered that the duke had enough problems at home already, so he would leave him alone. In April 2026, a question about Harry’s call, at the Kyiv Security Forum, for the United States to help end the war in Ukraine drew a reply that the prince was not speaking for the United Kingdom; Trump then inquired how his wife was doing and asked that his regards be passed along.
Harry has largely avoided naming the president, though he pushed back in January 2026 over a Fox interview around the Davos forum in which Trump described North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies in Afghanistan this way: “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. Keir Starmer, then the prime minister, called the remark “insulting and frankly appalling” in a video message the next day, and his office said at the time that “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.” Starmer announced his resignation in June and left office on July 20, when Andy Burnham succeeded him. The prince’s record includes a decade in the British military and two tours in Afghanistan.
Buckingham Palace put the position on the record in a letter released on Monday, September 7, in which the Lord Chamberlain wrote to officials across government and the military to confirm that Harry and Meghan remain non-working members of the royal family and will keep refraining from using their royal titles, as they have since 2020. Any charity work they take on will be carried out in a private capacity, the letter said, and operational security decisions are matters for the relevant police agencies. “In short, their position is akin to private citizens with commercial and charitable interests,” it added.
A spokesperson for the couple said they were surprised by the way it was released; their representatives received a copy an hour and 12 minutes beforehand.
The Sussexes, for now, are easing into a quieter life in the English countryside, with no working royal roles on the horizon.
