Prince Harry appeared to up the ante in his simmering feud with Donald Trump Sunday, making a fire-breathing speech to open the Invictus Games in Canada in which he said the competitors' “courage, values and humanity” deserved special respect at a time “when there is no shortage of crises, no absence of uncertainty, no lack of weak moral character in the world.”
Traditionally, members of the royal family avoid all mentions of global affairs lest they risk being seen to interfere in politics, let alone the political choices of a specific country.
However, Harry’s extraordinary speech to a cheering crowd in Vancouver gave some hints from the outset that it would be unbound by royal precedent when Harry said: “In this moment of difficulty and division …. we gather here in a spirit of unity.”
The extraordinary comment came just a day after Trump, when asked if he would deport Harry from the U.S., as he frequently hinted before the election, told the New York Post: “I don’t want to do that. I’ll leave him alone. He’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.”
The shockingly personal attack on Meghan distracted from Trump’s backdown on deporting Harry, whose immigration status has been the subject of debate and court actions ever since he admitted to taking drugs in his memoir, Spare. In the book, Harry wrote of the time he got high on mushrooms at Friends star Courteney Cox’s house. He also revealed he had used cocaine at 17 “to feel different.”
The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing conservative think tank which authored Project 2025, has launched legal efforts to force the U.S. authorities to release details of Harry’s immigration application.
The pressure group claims that given that a declaration of using drugs usually bars an individual from immigrating into the U.S., Harry lied on the forms or was given a sweetheart deal by the Biden administration.
Trump has enthusiastically jumped on the anti-Harry bandwagon. He told Nigel Farage in a GB News interview last year: “We’ll have to see if they know something about the drugs, and if he lied they’ll have to take appropriate action.”
Farage asked if “appropriate action” could mean “not staying in America,” to which Trump replied, according to the outlet’s website, “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.”
The Sussex-Trump feud dates to a 2016 Comedy Central panel show in which Meghan, then an actress and not linked to Harry, expressed her contempt for Trump, labeling him “misogynistic” and “divisive,” and joking that she might move to Canada if Trump was elected president.
Trump later famously referred to her comment as “nasty” ahead of his state visit to the U.K. in June 2019, by which time he was president and Meghan had married Harry.
In 2022, Trump told fellow Meghan critic Piers Morgan: “Harry is whipped like no person I think I’ve ever seen.” He predicted the couple would divorce, saying, “It’ll end, and it’ll end bad… I want to know what’s going to happen when Harry decides he’s had enough of being bossed around… Or maybe when she decides that she likes some other guy better. I want to know what’s going to happen when it ends, OK?”
Trump used his new interview with the New York Post to praise Harry’s estranged older brother, William, with whom he met in Paris in December.
“I think William is a great young man,” he said.
