Donald Trump says Meghan Markle takes bad press too 'personally': 'You have to be a little bit different than that'
Donald Trump thinks that Meghan Markle should stop taking media coverage of herself so "personally."
The President of the United States spoke exclusively to Nigel Farage on LBC ("Leading Britain's Conversation") this week, and he had some advice for the Duchess of Sussex when Farage asked him if he felt sorry for the former "Suits" actress amid her well-documented struggle with negative press.
"Well, I've been watching her interviews and I've seen it, and she's taken it very personally," Trump said. "I guess you have to be a little bit different than that."
"But she takes it very, very personally, and I can understand it," he added. "But I don't know her. I will say I've met Harry, he's great. He is really a fine young man, the whole family is terrific."
The president was referring to Meghan's candid interviews as part of the recent "Harry & Meghan: An African Journey" documentary, in which she called dealing with incessant and oftentimes overreaching media attention since entering the royal family orbit "really challenging."
"Look, any woman, especially when they're pregnant, you're really vulnerable, and so that was made really challenging," Meghan said. "And then when you have a newborn, you know?"
SEE ALSO: Meghan and Harry were 'bruised and vulnerable' during interview, reporter says
"Also, thank you for asking, because not many people have asked if I'm okay," the duchess added. "But it's a very real thing to be going through behind the scenes."
While Trump may consider Prince Harry to be a "fine young man," he expressed earlier this year that he thinks of Meghan very differently: During an interview with The Sun ahead of his State Visit to Buckingham Palace in June, Trump was asked about the former "Suits" actress' comments from 2016 in which she declared that he was "divisive" and "misogynistic," to which he replied, "I didn't know that. What can I say? I didn't know that she was nasty."
Trump has since denied multiple times that he called the Duchess of Sussex nasty, saying that the controversy was "made up by the Fake News Media, and they got caught cold!"
That still made things quite awkward for the president when he visited the royal family at Buckingham Palace just days later. While Meghan skipped the visit because of her maternity leave (she had given birth to her first son, Archie Harrison, less than a month earlier), Harry appeared at a private lunch with the Trump family, during which he was observed to have "noticeably hung back" amid the controversy.
SEE ALSO: Meghan Markle says she was warned not to marry Prince Harry
Following his State Visit, Trump sat down with Piers Morgan, where he called Harry a "terrific guy" and revealed that they did not discuss the scandal during the visit.
"We didn't talk about it. I was going to, because it was so falsely put out there," Trump said, not giving a reason as to why he didn't bring it up. "When you see that transcript, you see it's the exact opposite of what they said. Did you look at the transcript?"
"No, no, just the opposite," he added when asked if Harry was standoffish around him. "In fact, he spent a lot of time talking to Ivanka and talking to my family. I went up, and he couldn't have been nicer."