Trump Backs Off Canada, Pulls King Charles Into Politics PLUS Meghan’s “Creepy” Easter Video

0:00 Ah calorogus shark media now lo and welcome to Palace Intrigue. I am your host, Mark Francis Donald Trump, since he is apparently no longer planning to annex Canada. In a new interview with royal biographer Robert Hardman, Trump joke that despite all his past talk about Canada becoming America's fifty first state, he has now concluded there simply is not enough time left in his presidency to erase two centuries of Canadian identity. I suppose the Canadians have got two hundred years of history and all that oh Canada thing. Trump said, you can't deal with that in three and a half years. I guess it's not going to happen.

0:44 According to Hardman, the moment came after he told Trump to please leave Canada alone, adding that annexing the country would undoubtedly make the King of Canada unhappy. The prompted Trump to ask, do they still recognize the king or have they stopped that? When told the Canadianians do still recognize King Charles as head of state, Trump reportedly replied, but they have these terrible politicians. They're nice to my face and then they say bad things behind my back. The problem is some guy drew that straight line to make a border. He should have just drawn it fifty miles further north and there wouldn't have been a problem. Last year, after Trump repeatedly floated the idea of Canada as the fifty first state, King Charles made a carefully choreographed visit to Ottawa for the state opening of Parliament.

1:26 During that trip, he told Canadians their country was strong and free, in what was widely seen as a subtle but unmistakable assertion of Canadian sovereignty. Trump also had warm words for the King, personally calling him a fantastic guy and praising the way he has handled his cancer diagnosis. He's a great guy, and he's grown so much in the last ten years, and especially over the last couple of years as king. His fight has shown that, Trump said. He also reflected on Queen Elizabeth I, saying he once tried to get her to reveal her favorite presidents and prime ministers, but she refused to take the bait. So I realized that's why she lasted seventy years without a complaint, because she was so good at it. Trump said, the rest of us would have said, oh, I liked so and so, but she was so clever, and I know she liked me because we talked a lot. The King has found himself unexpectedly pulled into Donald Trump's latest broadside over NATO and the war in Iran. In an interview where The Telegraph, the US President claimed the King would have taken a very different view from Prime Minister Sakia Stamer over the conflict, saying his Majesty would have stood by the president more closely. Trump said of the King, I like him. I've always liked him as a prince.

2:34 He's a good man, a great representative for your country, before adding I think he would have taken a very different stand on the war in Iran, but he doesn't do that. I mean, he's a great gentleman. He also described the monarch as a friend of mine and said I have a great relationship with King Charles. I've known him a long time. Trump went on to praise the King personally, saying he's a wonderful and brave man. To be honest with you, He's been through a lot in many ways. In the Telegraph, John Hemming suggests King Charles could use his upcoming address to Congress not as a ceremonial speech, but as a strategic intervention to try to steady a badly strained Anglo American alliance. His main suggestion is that the King should start by reminding Congress that the special relationship is much deeper than current politics. Hemmings says Charles should frame it not just around the Second World War and Cold War, but around the longer shared democratic tradition between Britain and America, even going back to the English Civil War and figures like Thomas Paine. In other words, this is not just a diplomacy, it is a shared political DNA. He also thinks Charles should widen that argument into the broader English speaking security bloc. Hemings points to the Five Eyes countries the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as a uniquely durable alliance built not just on sentiment but on real military intelligence and bureaucratic integration. His point is that this relationship is still operational, well not nostalgic. A big part of the piece is essentially a plea for the King to defend NATO and

4:05 language that can still appeal to a skeptical American audience. Hemmings argues that Charles should make the case that NATO remains in both British and American self interest, and he suggests the King should note that alliance burden sharing has improved. He writes that for the first time, all NATO members have reached the two percent GDP spending target, and says Charles should underline that allies have also agreed to move toward five percent by twenty thirty five. In his Substack, Deep Crown wrote at length about charles trip. Deep Crown explains, let us talk about what he is actually walking into, because I think it is not fully appreciated outside of certain rooms in certain buildings on both sides of the Atlantic.

4:47 Quite how extraordinarily delicate this moment is. Charles is a constitutional monarch. That is not a decorative fact. It is the central governing fact of everything he does and does not do. He does not have foreign policy positions. It does not have opinions about wars, at least not ones that can be uttered allowed. He holds, in the ancient and largely theoretical language of the prerogative, the power to declare war, and exercises it precisely never That is the arrangement. That is the deal. It has worked more or less for several centuries. What he is being asked to do in Washington is something rather more complicated than a state visit. He is being asked to be royal with a capital are in a room full of people who are watching him for signals he is constitutionally forbidden from sending. Every senator in that chamber will be looking for something. The administration will be looking for an endorsement, however, a bleak of the current direction of American foreign policy. The opposition will be looking for a flicker of discomfort they can use.

5:46 The British government, whose relationship with the White House is at this moment something less than warm, will be hoping the King can do what their own diplomats have been unable to do, walk into that building and make the Americans feel well disposed toward them without anyone being able to say quite why. And he must do all of this while saying functionally, nothing that can be quoted out of context, nothing that could be clipped, nothing that can be held up the following morning is evidence of a royal view on a matter of active political controversy. He must be present, and yet absent. He must be warm and yet neutral. He must fill a room and leave no fingerprints. This is, I want to be clear, and almost impossible. Brief. The President has already complicated things considerably his remarks to the Telegraph last week. The suggestion that the King privately saw things different from Sir Kiir were not a compliment. They were a trap, elegantly disguised as one, and the Palace, to its credit, did not step in it.

6:39 Five words in silence, that is the correct response. But the trap remains set, and Charles will have to walk past it in front of a joint session of Congress while cameras record every micro expression. Into this walks Charles, with his careful suits and his careful words, in his decades of practice of being in rooms where everyone wants something from him that he cannot give, he is, and I say this with some genuine admiration, extraordinarily well suited to exactly this kind of moment. Not because he is a natural politician, which he is not, but because he has spent his entire adult life learning to inhabit a role that requires him to mean more than he says. That is a very particular skill. Most people never acquire it. He has had seventy odd years of instruction. The crown itself is the message that it's the thing that is easy to lose sight of in the noise of the current moment. Simply standing there, representing the continuity in the dignity of an institution that has outlasted every political crisis it has ever encountered, is in itself a form of argument, a quiet one, but not an unpersuasive one. You do not need to say that alliance is matter, that institutions matter, that the patient work of diplomacy matters. If you are the living embodiment of all three, you simply need to be in the room. Whether it is enough for this room, on this trip, at this moment, I honestly do not know.

7:55 I think it might be. I think he understands better than he has sometimes given credit for. The visit itself as the statement that arriving, behaving impeccably, and leaving without incident is a diplomatic achievement of the first order. When the world is arranged as it currently is, nobody will ask about any of this at the state dinner. Incidentally, they will talk about the gardens at windsor in the King's watercolors and whether the Queen is enjoying Washington and that, in its way, is exactly how it is supposed to work. You can subscribe to Deep Crown for free by searching for Deep Crown on Google or click the link in the show notes, or check out Deep Crown on substack. We'll be back in a moment. Meghan Markle's Easter Instagram post has sparked another round of criticism after one particular video of Princess Lilibet left some viewers calling the clip unsettling rather than sweet. Megan shared a collection of Easter moments from the family's Montecito home, including footage of chickens being fed, eggs being hunted and arching, and Lilibert running through the garden, but it was one short video of four year old Littabit wandering alone across the lawn in bunny years, carrying two stuffed animals that grew the strongest reaction online. The clip showed a little bit filmed from behind as she walked barefoot through the garden in a pink dress, and some critics said the way it was shot felt odd rather than candid. One commenter wrote, this is kind of creepy. It's like Lily has a stalker and we're seeing through his eyes. Another added agreed it has a truly sentence to feel to it. A third person wrote, even creepy that it's her own mother who

9:27 is following behind her and filming an innocent moment to post on Instagram debate the public into paying them attention. Some people are describing the video as the Montecito Blair witch Project. People notes that both Archie and Lilibet appear to have inherited Harry's red hair, although in slightly different shades. Archie's is described as more awe burned, while Lillibert's appearance appears to be a lighter, ginger much closer to Harry's own coloring. Harry joked about the spencer gene with Stephen Colbert in twenty twenty three, saying the ginger jean is a strong one. The spencer gene is very, very strong. I actually really genuinely thought at the beginning of my relationship with Megan that should this go the distance and we have kids, that there's no way the ginger gene will stand up to my wife's jeans. But I was wrong.

10:13 Go gingers and they have it. If you'd like to email us addresses The Palace Intrigue at gmail and dot com. Please followus on Spotify, Apple, or the Apple of your choice. I'm Mark francis My thanks to John mcdermy. This Palace Intrigue and continums