Meghan also looked to President Trump, for whom she had nothing but contempt, as a comparable. ‘If Trump can be president, there’s no reason why I can’t be,’ she said. Harry would echo a variation of this sentiment when he spoke to the Russian pranksters who pretended to be Greta Thunberg and her father Svante on New Year’s Eve 2019 and in January 2020 and stated that if Trump could be president, pretty much anyone could be as well.
As regards Trump, Meghan was on firmer ground. Prior to holding office as president, he had possessed no more political experience than she did. He had been a well-known businessman and television personality, but there the parallels between the two of them began to diverge. While she had engaged in commercial activity as well as becoming a television personality, the degree of his renown had not been comparable with hers. Whatever his track record commercially, Donald Trump has had vast experience of deal-making. He had become a household name long before he became a television personality. Meghan had never been a household name prior to her marriage to Harry. She had never owned hotels or casinos or a successful club like Mar-a-Lago, nor had her name ever appeared on airlines, hotels, and iconic New York buildings. While she regarded herself as a businesswoman because she had agents who had successfully obtained minor endorsements for her, she was out of Trump’s league both as a businesswoman and a television personality. He had fronted one of the United States’ most popular television network shows, while she had been an ensemble player on a minor albeit reasonably successful cable TV show. But she was now a member of the British Royal Family, and her profile would continue to grow exponentially. Being a superb strategist, if Meghan played her cards right, her springboard could be every bit as appealing to a different category of supporter and she could be equally electable.
There was, however, an important difference between The Donald’s acquisition of the presidency and Meghan’s ambition to achieve it. Over the years, I have met members of the Trump family socially. Three of my oldest friends know them very well. Some like him, some don’t. On one thing they are all agreed. Donald Trump fell into the presidential contest to boost his profile commercially. Being someone who likes winning, he then set out to win. But no one was more surprised than he when he was actually elected president. Accidental success is patently different from focused ambition, and though Meghan disparages him, there is no doubt that he has thrown himself into the presidential role with gusto. To his admirers, he has made a success of it. To his critics, everyone else is responsible for the successes of his administration.
As a character, Trump superficially has more in common with Diana, Princess of Wales than he appears to have with her daughter-in-law. Somehow, Diana always managed to grow into the role, whatever her latest role was. To his supporters, Trump has done the same. This is not an attribute which Meghan’s critics regard her as having displayed during her brief tenure as a working royal. They would have us believe that even her supporters cannot claim that she successfully lived up to the role she then abandoned after less than two years.
But they could actually have misinterpreted her actions and ambitions. Meghan’s apparent lack of tenacity allied to her unwillingness to adjust to her royal role and fulfill its requirements, filled her supporters within the Royal Family, the Establishment, and the Commonwealth with perplexity. Behind the scenes, people really struggled to understand how someone who had been made so welcome could be making her life and theirs so difficult when with slight adjustments, she could so easily succeed. I was told early on that her ‘inordinate self-belief’ would be her downfall unless she was careful. She was too confident, too inflexible, too convinced that her way was both the best and the only way, and that all other ways were beneath her contempt. Her attitude was that she had better things to do with her time than consider, much less negotiate with, points of view that did not accord with hers. She came across as disrespectful, narrow- minded, and self-satisfied, with more than one person who dealt with her ending up thinking that she was too arrogant, smug and sanctimonious to ever fit into a solid institution like the monarchy. Or indeed to succeed as a politician anywhere. What they seem not to have understood, was that Meghan might well have had a more sophisticated game plan than they were giving her credit for. Why adjust to something if it’s only ever going to be a small part of your future goal?
If that was the case, and her real end-game was the Presidency of the United States of America, just how does Meghan propose to achieve her goal? Politicians even more than constitutional monarchists need to be pliable enough to forge alliances. They have to duck and dive, bend and weave far more than royals, because the electorate is their judge. And that electorate is even more nuanced than any royal institution. It consists of a plethora of special interest groups, some clashing with others, few of whom want to be lectured to by politicians as if they are nine year olds in Sunday School, much less by a former actress and a royal prince who preach one thing but practise another. The end result was that many of the courtiers who came across Meghan while she was adjusting to her royal role, ended up thinking that she was ‘naive’, ‘politically inept’, a ‘loose and dangerous cannon’ who was ‘delusional about what
