Donald Trump has been known to lavish Queen Elizabeth II with praise and boast about their close relationship. But according to a new biography about her life, his flattery got him nowhere.
The Queen hosted Trump in 2018 and again in 2019, and apparently, he wasn’t her cup of tea. In his upcoming book, Q: A Voyage Around the Queen, British journalist Craig Brown revealed that the late Queen found the former president to be “very rude.”
“A few weeks after President Trump’s visit, for instance, she confided in one lunch guest that she found him ‘very rude’: she particularly disliked the way he couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder, as though in search of others more interesting,” wrote Brown, who used to be a Parliamentary sketch writer and contributor to the British magazine Private Eye.
Brown added that the monarch “also believed Trump ‘must have an arrangement’ with wife Melania — why else would she remain married to him?”
Trump appears to have had a much more positive view of their encounter. In a 2019 interview, he claimed that the Queen had the time of her life in his company and that their conversation was so intense, he was unaware of others in the room.
“The meeting with the Queen was incredible,” Trump told Fox News then. “I think I can say I really got to know her because I sat with her many times, and we had automatic chemistry; you understand that feeling. It’s a good feeling. But she’s a spectacular woman.”
Though Trump paints a very different picture, it’s worth noting that he faced backlash for eschewing royal protocol not once but twice during this meeting when he shook her hand instead of bowing and then proceeded to walk in front of her.
Then after her death in 2022, Trump paid tribute to the Queen: “Melania and I will always cherish our time together with the Queen, and never forget Her Majesty’s generous friendship, great wisdom, and wonderful sense of humor. What a grand and beautiful lady she was — there was nobody like her!”
In response to Brown’s claims, Trump’s spokesman, Steven Cheung, told Newsweek that they were “nothing more than fake news intended to use made-up, salacious fabrications in order to sell copies of a book that belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section.”
Brown’s account is pretty shocking when you consider how reserved the Queen was — she was famous for keeping her personal thoughts and opinions on people and events to herself.
Meanwhile, Buckingham Palace hasn’t commented on the book, which isn’t unusual because they don’t generally offer such comments. For now, we’ll have to decide for ourselves whether the claims have any truth to them. But will we be buying the book to see what else the queen might have said about Trump and other controversial world leaders? You betcha.
