Donald Trump has attempted to clear up reports he called Meghan Markle “nasty” by essentially repeating the accusation.
In an interview for Good Morning Britain, Piers Morgan asked the president to clarify comments he made in an interview with The Sun in which he was told the Duchess of Sussex once said he was “misogynistic” and “divisive”.
Trump had told the paper: “I didn’t know that. What can I say? I didn’t know that she was nasty.”
When asked by Morgan to explain the comments, Trump said: “They said some of the things that she said and It’s actually on tape. And I said: ‘Well, I didn’t know she was nasty;’.
“I wasn’t referring to she’s nasty. I said she was nasty about me. And essentially I didn’t know she was nasty about me.”
When pressed again by Morgan to clarify what he said, Trump added: “She was nasty to me. And that’s okay for her to be nasty, it’s not good for me to be nasty to her and I wasn’t.”
But he then added: “You know what? She’s doing a good job, I hope she enjoys her life... I think she’s very nice.”
The president also claimed reports that Prince Harry gave him a frosty reception at Buckingham Palace on Monday were false and that he had intended to speak to him about the comments he made about his wife.
Photographs taken inside Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s official London residence, appear to showed the moment the Duke of Sussex glimpsed Trump just metres away.
Asked if the meeting was awkward, Trump said: “No, no, no, just the opposite. In fact, he spent a lot of time talking to Ivanka and talking to my family. I went up - he couldn’t have been nicer. Couldn’t have been nicer… I think he’s great.”
The president also appeared to backtrack on comments he made during a press conference with Theresa May in which he said the NHS will be “on the table” in talks on a UK-US trade deal after Brexit.
He said: “I don’t see it being on the table.
“Somebody asked me a question today and I say everything is up for negotiation, because everything is. But I don’t see that as being, that something that I would not consider part of trade. That’s not trade.”
The president is expected to meet Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove on Wednesday morning, before his first official engagement in Portsmouth at 11.00am to mark the 75th anniversary of D-Day in June 1944.