Trump warns Duke of Sussex could face US visa consequences over past drug use
The Republican presidential frontrunner said Harry should not receive preferential treatment if he is found to have lied on his visa application.
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Your support makes all the difference.The Duke of Sussex could face consequences if he lied about taking drugs on his US visa application, former American president Donald Trump has said.
In a preview of an interview between Mr Trump and GB News presenter Nigel Farage, the Republican party’s presumptive nominee for the 2024 US presidential election said Harry should not receive preferential treatment.
Asked if Harry should have “special privileges” if he is found to have lied in his application, Mr Trump said: “No. We’ll have to see if they know something about the drugs, and if he lied they’ll have to take appropriate action.”
However, Mr Trump refused to be drawn on whether Harry could be forced to leave the US, where he currently lives with his wife and children.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said.
“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.”
It comes after Harry’s references to taking cocaine, marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms in his memoir Spare prompted a conservative Washington DC think tank to question why he was allowed into the US in 2020.
The Heritage Foundation brought the lawsuit against the Department for Homeland Security (DHS) after a Freedom of Information Act request was rejected – claiming it was of “immense public interest”.
The lawsuit argues that US law “generally renders such a person inadmissible for entry” to the country.
In a hearing last November, lawyers from the DHS responded that Harry’s visa application answers regarding past drug use should not be disclosed because it is “private personal information”.
“Much like health, financial, or employment information, a person’s immigration information is private personal information,” they said.
“If the court accepts Plaintiffs’ arguments, the Government would need to reveal confidential immigration information about Prince Harry, a result the court should not adopt.”
Mr Trump also said during the interview that he believed Harry and Meghan treated the late Queen “very disrespectfully”.
He said: “I think there was great disrespect, then, to a person that I got to know very well and liked, the Queen, she was unbelievable.
“You know, I got to know her very well. Remember, I was supposed to be with her for 10 to 15 minutes and we ended up being like for two hours and then we had dinner that following night.”
He added: “She was unbelievable. And I thought she was treated very disrespectfully by them.
“She, I would say, although she wouldn’t show it because she was strong and smart, but I would imagine they broke her heart.
“The things that they were saying were so bad and so horrible. And she was in her 90s and hearing this stuff. I think they broke her heart. I think they really hurt her.”
Mr Trump added that he would ask the late Queen who her favourite prime minister and president were and she would reply that she “liked them all”.
Asked about the King, Mr Trump said he is a “really wonderful guy” and is “a little bit more into environmental restriction than I am”.
He said he hopes the King is “going to be OK”.
Mr Trump said the Princess of Wales editing the Mother’s Day photo of her with her children “shouldn’t be a big deal” and added that “everybody doctors [images]”.
He added: “I looked at that actually, and it was a very minor doctoring.”
Mr Trump’s 30-minute interview with Mr Farage was broadcast on GB News at 7pm on Tuesday.