Every family has one. The relative who storms out at Thanksgiving, slams the door hard enough for the whole block to hear, then—after years of telling strangers how terrible everyone back home is—shows up wanting a plate. Most Americans over a certain age recognize this routine: you don’t torch the people who raised you and expect a standing ovation when you stroll back through the front door.
Now imagine pulling that stunt on a global stage. Picture sitting down with Oprah, signing a Netflix deal, and publishing a tell-all memoir—each one a fresh grenade lobbed at your own family. Imagine cashing enormous checks off your family’s name while dragging it through international mud. And then, quietly, loading up the kids and heading home like the whole thing was just a phase.
President Donald Trump celebrated Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s return to the United Kingdom on Wednesday, saying he was “happy” to see the couple leave the United States.
“I’m happy about it,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office. “I was not a fan.”
No focus groups or carefully massaged talking points—just a president who looked at the cameras and said what countless people were already muttering into their coffee.
Trump didn’t stop there. He accused the couple of treating the royal family with “great disrespect,” zeroing in on Meghan’s conduct toward the late Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III. “I thought she was terribly disrespectful to the Queen, to King Charles,” he said. Then came the real hammer: “If I were the royal family, I would not have taken them back.”
Here’s what separates this from garden-variety celebrity commentary: Trump genuinely admires the institution Harry and Meghan spent years tearing apart. He has spoken about watching Queen Elizabeth’s coronation on television as a child, sitting beside his Scottish-born mother. He called the late Queen “a great woman” who “really never made a mistake.” He described King Charles as “a great, great guy.” So when he calls the Sussexes disrespectful, it’s personal—not performative.
And his instincts weren’t new. Back in 2020, when Meghan appeared to back Joe Biden, Trump offered a warning that aged remarkably well: “I wish a lot of luck to Harry, because he’s going to need it.” Six years later, with the couple retreating to the very country they so publicly abandoned, it’s difficult to call that anything but prescient.
The record is damning and entirely public. In 2021, an Oprah interview dropped allegations that an unnamed royal expressed concern about how dark baby Archie’s skin might be. Explosive stuff—conveniently impossible to verify since the person refused to name themselves. Then came the Netflix documentary series, followed by more grievances, drama, and zeros on the check. Harry’s memoir, Spare, a title that practically dares you to feel sorry for him, managed to embarrass his brother, stepmother, and father in a single volume.
Queen Elizabeth held firm. She flatly rejected the couple’s proposed “half-in, half-out” arrangement: you don’t get to keep the crown’s prestige while moonlighting as its loudest critic.
Now, after Harry lost his 2025 court appeal for government-funded security in Britain and told the BBC he wanted reconciliation—“there’s no point in continuing to fight anymore”—the whole family is relocating. Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet will attend school in the UK. Read between the lines: the California reinvention didn’t pan out.
