LONDON — President Trump said Prince Harry was “a great guy” after meeting him at Buckingham Palace and explained that he never intended to say his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, was nasty in an interview shortly before his U.K. state visit.
Speaking to the Sun newspaper before his arrival, Trump had said he was unaware that Meghan had claimed she would leave the U.S. if he won the election. “I didn’t know that she was nasty,” he said.
But in an interview with the British broadcaster Piers Morgan, Trump said that he was merely trying to say that he had not known that Meghan had been unkind toward him.
“They said some of the things that she said and It’s actually on tape,” he said.
“And I said: ‘Well, I didn’t know she was nasty’. I wasn’t referring to she’s nasty. I said she was nasty about me. And essentially I didn’t know she was nasty about me,” he said.
The duchess remains on maternity leave after the birth of Archie last month and was never scheduled to meet the president during his visit. However the British press has been rife with claims that her husband tried to avoid Trump during a tour of Buckingham Palace on Monday.
“No, no, no, just the opposite,” he said in the interview, recorded for ITV’s “Good Morning Britain” at the War Rooms from which Winston Churchill ran his World War Two campaign.
“In fact, he spent a lot of time talking to Ivanka and talking to my family,” Trump said. “I went up — he couldn’t have been nicer. Couldn’t have been nicer… I think he’s great.”
He added that he congratulated him on becoming a father.
Trump is attending 75th anniversary commemorations for D-Day in Portsmouth during his final day in Britain, before flying to Ireland and on to Normandy on Thursday.
Protests against his visit in London drew disappointing numbers for organizers, who said 75,000 people turned out, far short of the 250,000 they expected.
