I’ve witnessed some incredibly overexcited people in my life.
But for sheer unbridled joy, I’ve never seen anything to quite match Donald Trump’s beaming face when he returned to Air Force One after meeting Queen Elizabeth II for the first time, at Windsor Castle.
I was waiting to interview him aboard the US presidential plane, and he bounded into the Situation Room with a massive grin on his face.
“Piers, your Queen is FANTASTIC!” he bellowed ecstatically. “She’s a fantastic woman; so much energy and smart and sharp. She was AMAZING! Such a wonderful lady and so beautiful! It was such an honor to finally meet her. To have a Queen like that is great. She is so sharp, so wise, so beautiful. She’s a very special person!”
The reason for his extraordinary enthusiasm became clear when I asked him what went through his mind as he walked toward Her Majesty, and he replied: “I was thinking about my mother. My mother passed away a while ago and she was a tremendous fan of the Queen. She thought she was a woman of elegance, and my mother felt she was a great woman. I said to Melania, ‘Can you imagine my mother seeing this scene?’ The Queen is terrific. She is so sharp, so wise. She’s a very special person. I said to her, ‘You know, my mother was your big fan. She was born in Stornoway in the Hebrides.’”
Trump’s reverence for the Queen dates back to 1953, when he sat with his mother to watch the coronation on their new TV set in New York.
Young Donald, then just 6 years old, watched in awe and wonderment the extraordinary scenes from London.
As did Mary Trump.
“She was just enthralled by the pomp and circumstance,” her son later wrote in his best-selling book “The Art of the Deal.” “The whole idea of royalty and glamor.”
All this helps explain Trump’s latest blistering attack on Prince Harry, in which he ominously warned the runaway royal he’d be “on his own” if the former president wins back the White House in the November election, because of his “unforgivable” betrayal of the Queen.
Trump, speaking Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC, lambasted his successor President Biden for being “too gracious” to the Duke of Sussex since he quit Britain for America in 2020.
The Biden administration is engaged in a legal battle with a conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, which has sought public access to Harry’s visa application to see if he was honest about his extensive illegal drug use as detailed in his best-selling autobiography, “Spare,” or has received preferential treatment from the Biden camp.
In the book, Harry brazenly admitted to using marijuana, cocaine and psychedelic mushrooms, including in America at the homes of friends.
For most noncitizens, this would be disqualifying.
But government lawyer John Bardo of the Department of Homeland Security told a court last Friday that the book was not “sworn testimony or proof” that Harry took drugs.
Bardo argued, “Just saying something in a book doesn’t make it true” and added that people say things to “sell books” as he insisted Harry’s immigration records should remain private.
This defense has been widely criticized, with many pointing out that Biden’s team is only doing it because the prince and wife Meghan Markle have made no secret of their dislike of Trump and their support for the Democratic Party.
During his CPAC speech, Trump raged: “I wouldn’t protect him. He betrayed the Queen. That’s unforgivable. He would be on his own if it was down to me.”
If I were Harry, I’d find these words very concerning, because it might indeed soon be down to Trump, who can be a vengeful enemy. This is not the first time he’s taken a whack at Harry or his wife.
When I interviewed him for “Piers Morgan Uncensored” in 2022, he scoffed: “Harry is whipped. I won’t use the full expression, but Harry is whipped like no person I think I’ve ever seen. I’m not a fan of Meghan, and I wasn’t right from the beginning. I think poor Harry is being led around by his nose.”
And he predicted the couple would divorce: “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?”
In the same interview, he said the Sussexes should be stripped of their titles: “He has been so disrespectful to the country, and I think he’s an embarrassment.”
But this new threat to cut Harry off from any US government support could carry serious risk to the duke’s US ambitions.
Only last week, Harry admitted he’s been thinking of becoming an American citizen, but if Trump regains the presidency, he could very well stop that from happening.
And he might go even further and seek to have him deported, using the admitted drug abuse as an excuse — a fate that has befallen many others.
If that nuclear option was pressed — and knowing Trump as well as I do, his capacity for such acts of petty vengeance is unlimited — Harry would be forced to leave his idyllic California mansion and his adoptive country.
But where would he go?
It’s surely inconceivable that he could return to Britain, tail between his legs, having been tossed out of the US.
All recent polls show that most Britons loathe him for his constant attacks on the royal family, which caused such distress to the Queen in the last years of her life, and his brother, William, won’t even talk to him — which, given that he’ll be king one day, could spell even more revenge problems for Harry.
And if he’s not able to live and work in America, Harry’s lucrative family-trashing, money-minting gravy train would derail hard.
So this could be a very perilous few months for the man who wants to have his royal cake and eat it too.
How ironic if it’s Donald Trump who has the last laugh on the treacherous little weasel and tells him, “You’re fired!” because of the despicable way he treated his grandmother the Queen.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
