Harry's Remarks Risk Reigniting Trump Feud

0:01Prince Harry takes a swipe at Trump, Meghan releases her Christmas special, and Thomas Markle is rushed to hospital. I'm Jack Royston, Chief Royal Correspondent at Newsweek, and this is Newsweek's Royal Report. Hello listeners, and welcome to the show. Now, Prince Harry has mocked Donald Trump on a surprise appearance on the Stephen Colbert show. It was all very jokey and lighthearted, but he kind of suggested Trump had been elected as America's king, which chimes, of course, with the no king protests against Trump. So it's not a kind of real, like, in hard attack on the president, but it risks reigniting a long-running feud between the Sussexes and Trump.

0:42And of course, this has a big, very high stakes backdrop to it because it was only in 2024, only a year ago, that Trump was kind of making comments implying that action might be taken over Harry's visa in relation to the recreational drugs that he described taking in his book, spare. So it's all quite high stakes, but it was very kind of low key and jokey on camera. So we're going to talk a little bit about what Harry actually said and what the prospect is of this reigniting a kind of full scale war of words between the Sussexes and Trump. So they were kind of, it was, it looked like it was scripted, I think, and that they were kind, they clearly like practiced it before Harry was doing a bit of acting.

1:26And it was the kind of concepts of it was that Harry wanted to become a hallmark prince and star in a movie, um, to celebrate Christmas. And so, um, he was kind of like lightheartedly made fun of Americans saying, you know, Americans are obsessed with the Royal family and, um, Colbert, uh, pushed back by saying, I wouldn't say we're obsessed with royalty. And so then Harry says, really, uh, I heard you elected a King. Um, so obviously, you know, that the audience like cheered Harry when he first walked on set and when he made this reference to King they booed. I think it's safe to assume they were booing Trump rather than booing Harry.

2:03Obviously Stephen Colbert's history with Trump speaks for itself and Harry jokes and after making such a big deal about my great great great great great grandfather George III. So he then did this whole bit where he's saying he really really wants this, he'll do anything Colbert says it's not what you know, it's who you know. Do you know any major actresses. So they have this little joke, you know, referencing Meghan, they don't say her name. But then Harry says, I'll do anything. I'll record a self tape, I'll fly myself to an audition, I'll settle a baseless lawsuit with the White House, all the things you people in TV do.

2:42So obviously, a little bit of an implicit ribbing of CBS and ABC there for the lawsuits they settled with Trump. So all very lighthearted while it was on camera. but of course we do know what Harry thinks of Trump and he really doesn't like the man not only do we know that based on things he said before Trump was re-elected in 2024, 2025 but also actually since Trump's re-election in fact as recently as September Harry did a campaign with UNAIDS to try to raise increased funding for HIV prevention and he had this really huge figure attached to it which is that there are fears that due to cuts in funding, four million people could die preventable deaths from HIV and AIDS because retroviral treatments have been stopped due to funding cuts.

3:30Now, the campaign didn't mention the shuttering of USAID, but those figures are taken from UNAIDS reports that did pin it all on the shuttering of USAID. So clearly that is what has happened. Trump, Elon Musk have absolutely slashed funding. Retroviral treatment programs that were being given to patients were stopped midway through. Food aid as well stopped. There are actually other reports, other bits of research that suggest, I can't corroborate the numbers personally, but suggest that hundreds of thousands of people may have already died as a result of the shuttering of USAID. and the projections are that it could hit 4 million in the years to come if nothing is done.

4:22So we know that, you know, Harry's public comments about this didn't name Trump back in September, but we know that he will have put two and two together there. He will be in no uncertain terms that the UN campaign is about trying to get some new funding from somewhere, even if not America, to keep those HIV programs going. So we know that actually for Harry, his emotional connection to this, his emotional input in Donald Trump as an issue is huge. And HIV was obviously an issue that his mother campaigned on, Princess Diana. But then there's the flip side to this, which is the problems that Harry and Meghan have created for themselves by going after Trump in the past.

5:02And this all dates back to 2020. Trump was actually president when they first arrived in America. There was a presidential election coming around that November. and Harry and Meghan started making comments about the election and they were pitching those comments as being politically neutral, but they appeared to contain veiled swipes at Trump. Quite thinly veiled as well, as I actually would suggest. In fact, probably the most clear-cut one was Meghan did this appearance for an organisation called When All Women Vote, which is run by Michelle Obama. So it was a Democrat-backed organisation. It was one of these get-out-the-vote initiatives to try and increase voter turnout.

5:40And so because it was a get out the vote initiative, Megan said, well, you know, that's neutral. They're not saying get out and vote Democrat, but it was specifically targeting women of colour. Nothing wrong with doing that, but obviously women of colour are predominantly going to vote Democrat. So she then said, you know, the reason for her appearing on the call is because she was so passionate about trying to produce the change we all need and deserve. So in the context of an incumbent president and a campaign by the Democrats to unseat Trump, you know, it really doesn't take a genius to work out that what she's saying is we need to get the vote out in order to get Trump out of the White House.

6:20It was all very obvious. And, you know, actually, on one level, I don't actually necessarily think she did anything wrong, except for the fact that they wouldn't come clean about what was really going on. It was only the subterfuge and the smoke and mirrors that was wrong. You know, the whole point of quitting the monarchy was supposed to be to have greater freedom. But needless to say, you know, it escalated. Harry made further comments later in the year, I think in September that year, September 2020, speaking out against kind of misinformation and online hate and all this kind of stuff that was associated with Trump at that time.

6:54And so Trump was asked about it by journalists and he replied saying, I'm not a fan of hers. I would say this, and she has probably heard that. I wish a lot of luck to Harry because he's going to need it. So that's one of a number of very similar swipes that Trump's taken at Meghan over the years. So that's where things stood in 2020. And then obviously Trump lost. Biden got elected. And Harry and Meghan were no doubt very pleased. They didn't kind of celebrate publicly about it, but I'm sure they no doubt were. Then Harry's book came out in 2023. and in his book he talks about taking a number of different drugs, cannabis, cocaine, magic mushrooms and ayahuasca.

7:31So a right-wing think tank in America called the Heritage Foundation picked up on this and decided that they felt that Harry should not have been admitted to America having had that history of taking drugs. Now it should make absolutely clear Harry has no criminal convictions for possession of any drugs. He just said that he took some drugs in his book. now the heritage foundation put case very strongly in court and they basically said there is no plausible way that harry should lawfully have been allowed into america either they said he must have misled must have lied on his visa papers um or he was given pressure and preferential treatment they said by the biden administration um and allowed in basically because he's a big high profile celebrity now i should stress that actually trump was in power when harry and Meghan moved to America.

8:22Now, actually, lawyers, you know, immigration lawyers, experts told me at the time that the whole situation was kind of a lot more complicated than Heritage are making it out to be in court. Heritage ultimately lost their lawsuit. They wanted to force publication of Harry's visa papers to find out whether he lied. But it kind of doesn't matter for our purposes right now that Heritage lost that case or that the case was not properly founded. The key thing to remember is just that Heritage used that case to create this idea that Trump might deport Harry. That's the key thing to hold on to. It was a lawsuit that didn't have legs.

9:02It proved to be baseless. It was thrown out. They lost. But they used it to create a huge theatre around the idea that Trump might deport Harry from America. So just a couple of snippets. Kyle Brosnan, who was chief counsel for Heritage during that case, at one point said in a statement released to Newsweek, Prince Harry repeatedly admitted to using illegal drugs in his memoir. This fact alone makes him inadmissible into the United States. We sued to get answers to a simple question of whether the government gave Prince Harry preferential treatment when he entered the country. Now, obviously, like I said, there are actually other ways.

9:39You know, for example, you can get a waiver if you can show that you're not a drug user anymore. And also there is the simple possibility that Harry just didn't answer the question. It's also possible he initially came into America on a diplomatic visa. There are loads of possibilities. So it's not quite as simple as they make out in the case. But it all led to Trump being asked about Harry's visa during an interview with GB News in March 2024. And he was said, do you think Harry should get preferential treatment? And Trump replied, no, we'll have to see if they know something about the drugs.

10:12And if he lied, they'll have to take appropriate action. Trump was then asked what appropriate action might mean, whether that meant not staying in America. And he replied, oh, I don't know. You'll have to tell me. You just have to tell me. You would have thought they would have known this a long time ago. so Trump deliberately created a kind of ambiguity there where he allowed the idea to kind of percolate that maybe he might deport Harry now obviously Heritage went on to lose they kind of suggested at the time that Trump had said he wanted to deport Harry or had vowed to deport Harry whereas I would say Trump's comments were slightly more subtle and nuanced than that and it was more a case of kind of like doing the classic Trump thing of putting a dead cat on the table Trump, you know, Harry and Meghan didn't intervene in the election.

11:01The key thing is, though, is that with that in the background, Harry and Meghan didn't intervene in the 2024 election, as they might have been expected to do. You know, there was a kind of build-up of anticipation about whether they would rerun what they did in 2020, now with the even greater freedom, having properly cut ties with the monarchy. So, you know, it was never acknowledged publicly or confirmed publicly, but the widely held view at the time, was that Harry and Meghan basically kept their mouths shut because they knew better than to try to take on a guy who was probably going to win, you know, irrespective of what they did and said, and that they might just cause, you know, huge problems for themselves.

11:42You know, bear in mind, Kamala Harris had her biggest name celebrity endorsements that she wanted. She had, you know, effectively Beyonce and Taylor Swift. So, you know, what further difference does Meghan and Harry add to what Kamala already had? But by contrast, if you do that and Trump then revokes Harry's visa and kicks him out of America, obviously that's a catastrophe for the Sussexes. So clearly now some time has passed. Trump, one of the things about him is, you know, he's a vengeful guy. He does want to get back and get even with people, as, you know, Letitia James has found out, for example.

12:19And so, you know, it's irrespective of where of the Heritage Foundation lawsuit being ill founded in the eyes of the judge, at least. There's always the prospect that Trump will just do something crazy because he's Trump and he's incredibly unpredictable. So, you know, there you are. Harry clearly feels like some time has passed now and he's eased his way back into a slightly bigger swipe or slightly more direct swipe at the president. And it was all very lighthearted and jokey. but we know that there's a kind of deeper emotional connection for Harry that sits underneath that, which is that he has worked with charities and organisations operating in parts of the world that have been hugely affected by USAID being shuttered.

13:03His own charity, some of them have received money from USAID in the past. I think from PEPFA, which is the president's fund for challenging or combating HIV and AIDS. So the key question now, I suppose, is where this goes next. You know, will a journalist ask Trump? You know, Trump obviously gives press briefings all the time. Will he be asked about Harry's comments? If he is asked, will he react? You know, will he get upset and angry about it? It is very lighthearted. So I think probably right now, Harry maybe hasn't done enough to earn the kind of rebuke or revenge that he would need to be seriously worried about.

13:42But it is one reason why it could be worth Harry giving serious consideration to trying to become a US citizen. It would be very difficult for him because he would have to renounce his allegiance to any foreign prince. So in other words, it would be a formal breaking of his allegiance to the monarchy, you know, in writing on paper. So, and he might have to give up his titles. So it's tricky. It's a really tricky one for him. But if he did do it, then Trump would not be any, you know, he did succeed in gaining US citizenship, then Trump would not be able to just kick him out of the country quite so easily.

14:16That in turn would mean that he would be able to vote in American elections. It would also mean that he would be able to, you know, Harry and Meghan would just be able to throw a quarter into the wind and come out and properly, fully endorse a candidate and, you know, even help campaign for that candidate. They could, you know, move past this kind of mealy-mouthed, like, you know, we're just helping people, you know, encouraging people to vote thing that they did in 2020. Right, on that note, I'm going to take a quick break, but just a reminder to rate and review the Royal Report on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your favourite shows.

14:50We are, of course, a YouTube podcast now too, so like and subscribe if you watch on YouTube. And when I'm back, Meghan Markle shares some of her favourite UK Christmas traditions.

15:05Hello and welcome back to the show. Megan has released her holiday special of her lifestyle cooking show, and it's called With Love, Megan Holiday Celebration. It's very much the same format as the previous two seasons, if you saw those. I actually think it might have been recorded around at the same time, because her dog is in the series, and her dog died before even the first two seasons were released. So that kind of hints that maybe they filmed it in the run-up to Christmas last year. but you know it has some like some warm charming moments in it I do struggle I've struggled a little bit with the whole series and my concerns are certainly not blown out of the water by the latest version but you know it has some sweet moments in it it's that very much kind of like over like too much effort that she's putting into it and it's a level of effort that I just simply do not have the time to do so for example she has she has like personalized advent calendars for her kids which you know they're not like bought from the supermarket they're these like it's like a piece of cloth with pouches in and then she puts little gifts in them now I'm actually not against that idea I think you know in fact we are doing something kind of similar it's not very Megan what we're doing but with my son we just bought him a load of football cards he loves like footballers and soccer he loves soccer and so he's getting all these little football cards instead of the kind of chocolate each day.

16:38So, you know, I'm not against the principle, and she writes these little love messages to her children in them, which I do think is sweet. And I'm not necessarily against it, but with Megan, it's just like, if I was going to go out and do all the things that she does, it would just take so much time. and I suppose the spirit of what she's trying to do in some of it I can fully jump on board with but like obviously she goes to enormous lengths and it just leaves me with the feeling that the only person who I could picture realistically going through and doing all the stuff that Megan does you know is probably somebody with like an old school family setup where one of the parents maybe doesn't work and so does have loads of time on their hands and wants to like give something to the family.

17:28But that's kind of, it's really interesting to me because it feels currently to me and obviously absolutely no judgment at all about how other people's family lives are set up. But it feels to me like the cost of living has got so bad that I don't think there are that many families that can afford that set up anymore. I think there are women who have gone back into full-time work but who might, even 20, 30 years ago, might not have done so but just have to really because you need that extra money to pay all your bills. It just contributes to this feeling that I have that the whole show is kind of rooted in a history from about 20 odd years ago before the collapse of linear television or scheduled TV.

18:13Because obviously we all grew up where the TV networks were king and now the majority of young people these days, they watch YouTube as their biggest source of content and so they're not, you know, this format where you're sitting down and you're watching like a whole show which gives you, you know, a dozen ideas about things you could do to prepare for Christmas feels slightly dated to me and it feels like it's targeted at an audience that I'm not totally convinced exists anymore when I think about all the people I know. And, you know, don't get me wrong, like I'm a person who particularly, like I don't do craft.

18:47Megan does a lot of craft in this show. She not just makes those advent calendars, she makes her own Christmas crackers you know she makes them from scratch with like cardboard and she puts the gifts in then she cuts out this like festive paper and she wraps it all around and she even buys like I don't know I know that Christmas crackers I discovered newly discovered via Megan's festive special that Americans don't really do Christmas crackers so if you don't know about them then they have this little tag which when you pull the cracker it goes snap and she's even somehow bought those. So I don't totally know where she bought them from.

19:24But yeah, she makes the whole thing from scratch. And to me, I actually love Christmas crackers, but I would never make them from scratch. Like the whole point of them is that you just sit, you know, you sit down at the big Christmas meal and then you just do them pop. It's meant to be tacky. The stuff in there isn't meant to be really heartfelt and considered. It's meant to be tacky and cheap. So, you know, my classic thing is I've got like a dozen of these tiny little nail clippers that are too small and ineffective to ever be used by anybody, but I've just won them in Christmas crackers over the years.

19:55Or they do like fiddle toys and like the paper hats that you put on your head. And yes, stupid jokes. And I can see why Megan likes Christmas crackers because the jokes are very cheesy and corny, which is exactly Megan's sense of humor. So I can 100 % see what she likes about them. But the effort that she goes to with all of this stuff, I just don't have the time. And I'm somebody who particularly does not take to craft, to crafting. I'm not a crafter. My wife crafts much more, much better than I do. And I know other people who craft, you know, are really into craft as well, but I still struggle to see, and I'm trying, what I do when I watch this show, cause I know that it's not aimed predominantly at me and I'm totally comfortable and fine with that.

20:35I don't expect it to be, but I try and imagine a person in my life who I can imagine doing all of this stuff. and I just can't alight on anybody who I can imagine going to these great lengths. And, you know, I think the classic example of it with the Christmas crackers is that Megan kind of makes a bit of a mistake with them. So she's obviously adopting here a UK tradition in the Christmas crackers and she makes that very clear. But she, like, the presents inside are tailored to the person, to the specific person who she wants to give them to. So, you know, maybe like Archie, when he pops the cracker, he gets a toy.

21:15That's for him. Harry, when he pops the cracker, gets a toy. That's for him. But that's kind of not what crackers are supposed to be about. Crackers, you either win or you lose. And nobody knows beforehand who's going to win, which means you shouldn't know who the recipient of the presents inside is going to be. So what happens is one person takes one end of the cracker, the other person takes the other, you pull it. The middle section contains the presents, but it can only stick to one side or the other. so one person walks away with the gifts and the other person doesn't um and it's um yeah like so you can't know beforehand who the recipient of the presents is going to be so i don't see how you can come up with tailor-made presents just for them to me it doesn't seem to work but also it just kind of like megan is not the person to she you know megan is so well put together like all her outfits are impeccably put together and there's something about the whole christmas cracker thing that is inherently tacky and is meant to be tacky and the tackiness is part of the fun um and it's just it's kind of funny to me that she can't just let it be tacky she's got to make it like really earnest and sincere like crackers aren't meant to be sincere and not everything has to be like it's totally fine for there to be things in life that are like cheap and silly and devoid of emotional meaning like we can't all like go around being emotionally really engaged and meaningful in everything we do.

22:38Like when we don't want to be like, I don't want to be like, I don't want everything to be perfectly tailored to me or catered to me. I just want to go in, pull a cheesy Christmas cracker, stick the hat on my head while I eat my Christmas dinner. And then, you know, get on with making small talk with my, you know, whether it's work colleagues at work Christmas, whoever it is, family Christmas. Um, so it's like, yeah it's just letting sometimes you just want to let things be cheap and basic and simple and they're fine like that just left they're fine the way they are they don't need to be elevated and elevating them doesn't improve them um it just kind of kills what they're supposed to be about so that was one aspect of it um there was she did you know she when she did the advent calendar she wrote these cute little notes for archie and lily and you know i can imagine them finding that sweet She puts like a little gift.

23:29I don't know whether she seems to put like her chocolates in the Christmas crackers, which is not what we traditionally do in Britain. And she puts confetti in the Christmas crackers, which is also not traditional. She puts like a little boxed present in the advent calendars. Wasn't totally clear to me whether that had chocolate in or not. But, you know, yeah, chocolate Christmas advent calendars, obviously are as much the thing in Britain as they are in America. but I'll just read you what she wrote in her little notes to Archie and Lily. So she wrote, I love you because you're so kind in one.

24:06And in another, she wrote, I love you because you're so brave. So I can see them quite liking that, to be honest, especially their age they're at. They're still pretty young, Archie and Lily. Archie's 2019 birthday is six and Lily's 2021 birthday is four. So yeah, at the age they're at, I'd imagine that's quite nice for them. and I'm not you know I'm not against reusable advent calendars it's not a bad idea um I just think the sum total of I think it's partly it's a consequence of sitting down to watch a whole show about all of these things is that you can wind up feeling slightly overwhelmed by just how much prep you're watching or I do anyway and if maybe if it was like just a one hit thing on like TikTok or something where it was like instead of buying an advent calendar why don't you do this homemade thing?

24:55And then I could be like, okay, maybe I can manage just that. I can manage just this homemade advent calendar. Um, but it's the kind of avalanche of like all of this stuff that to me is taking up quite a lot of my time that I don't personally feel like I have. Um, but yeah, so that, that was a lot of what I felt about it. Megan got this guest on, um, Will Guidara, uh, apologies to Will, if I mispronounced his name, um, to, yeah, so he helped and make the crackers with her. And she did some other bits and pieces with him. He's a restaurateur. And there was this really interesting bit in it where he kind of encapsulated everything that I feel about this show, which is he said, so she rang his wife beforehand, found out that he liked this particular food and then like made these gujon version of that food to give to him when he arrived.

25:51and um so you know she was this is part like this she did this thing she megan often does in with love where she says like how excited she is to meet this person but also how amazing they are and so she really wants to impress them um and then he arrived and he was like did this whole spiel about how you know he doesn't want people to try too hard to impress um because you know he's like oh i would sooner eat chinese if somebody's going like to too great a length to impress me than I would rather just get takeout, get Chinese food. And he says, when I think about great dinner parties I've been to over the years, I don't think about what I ate.

26:29I just remember whether or not I left with my heart. And then she says, they both say together, feeling full. And it's really interesting because this brief moment where Megan kind of looks a bit like a rabbit in her headlights when he starts saying this thing about not working too hard to impress people, which to me feels like something of a kind of denunciation of the entire series with love megan but then she starts to like do this thing where she finishes all of his sentences for him and it creates this kind of like moment of i suppose like them being on the same page whereas it started off as him being like on quite a different page to her so i mean it was nice for me to see him say that because it felt like my perspective on it was represented in the show um i would have loved though for Megan to kind of give I suppose maybe a more authentic response because she must know that she does have that instinct to try really hard to impress people like she does kind of talk about it explicitly in other parts of the series and then when seeing it challenged it would have been much more interesting to me to see her say yeah do you know what that's me all over like that is me I'm worked so hard to impress people and you know have an honest authentic conversation about that but she it felt like she kind of had a moment of being trying to process whether or not this was a criticism and then smooth it out and smooth it over but sometimes you don't want to smooth things over on television because you know the non-smoothed overness is part of what's interesting like those are some of the most interesting bits of television there's actually a bit where uh she has a different guest on she calls harry down like there's this salad all the ingredients of the salad that the guest has made are all the things Harry hates.

28:16And Harry seems like slightly bemused. And then, you know, it seems always to be like, wait a second, this is too much of a coincidence that your guest has come with a salad with every single thing that I say I hate. So he then tries this dish that Megan's made, which is like the traditional dish that her mum always makes for Christmas. And then he's like, Harry decides he's going to get one back on Megan and says like, oh yeah, it's lovely. It's not quite as good as your mum's though. And Megan like reacts to that, but that's like, it's a bit, it's interesting. It's more interesting to see that than it is to see everybody agreeing and finishing each other's sentences, which is a tiny bit cringe.

28:52I want to talk a little bit about the reviews. Obviously the usual suspects in the British press have panned it. I've not seen loads of US reviews. If I've just missed them, then forgive me. But the one that I wanted to pick out and talk about is actually in The Guardian. and that is because The Guardian was like a really pro-Sussex newspaper back in the day and then when Harry and Meghan moved out of their Royal Bombshells era The Guardian have kind of gone a bit south on Harry and Meghan they don't give them the positive commentary anymore but The Guardian isn't part of that hardcore anti-Harry and Meghan right-wing media thing and they have in the past been very positive about them So this is a piece by Lucy Mangan, who is a kind of relatively well-known columnist.