President Trump praised Queen Elizabeth II as an “incredible woman” ahead of his meeting with the monarch Friday, and added that first lady Melania Trump is a “tremendous fan.”
In an interview with British newspaper The Sun in which Trump also attacked Prime Minister Theresa May over her strategy for exiting the European Union, the president said the queen had “never made a mistake” during her long reign.
“I really look forward to meeting her. I think she represents her country so well,” Trump said. “If you think of it, for so many years she has represented her country, she has really never made a mistake. You don’t see, like, anything embarrassing. She is just an incredible woman.”
“My wife is a tremendous fan of hers. She has got a great and beautiful grace about her,” he added.
His Scottish-born mother, Trump added, was also enamored with the British royalty. Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1930, died in 2000.
“My mother loved the queen. Any time the queen was on television, my mother wanted to watch it,” Trump said.
Trump is expected to meet the queen at her Windsor Castle residence Friday afternoon, halfway through his four-day visit to the U.K. and Scotland. His meeting with Elizabeth comes after Trump was widely condemned by British lawmakers for comments he made in the same interview about May as well as on the topic of mass immigration in Europe.
“The divisive, dog-whistle rhetoric in his Sun interview is repulsive. If signing up to the Trump worldview is the price of a deal, it’s not worth paying,” said one MP in May’s party.
The White House later clarified Trump’s remarks in a statement, noting that Trump referred to May as a “very good person” during the interview.
“As he said in his interview with the Sun she ‘is a very good person’ and he ‘never said anything bad about her,’” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “He thought she was great on NATO today and is a really terrific person.”