President Donald Trump, speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania yesterday, denied that he had kept Queen Elizabeth II waiting when he visited England last month. At the time of the meeting, The Daily Mail accused Trump of breaking royal protocol by forcing the queen to wait for him in the heat.
At the rally, Trump called the reports that he had kept the queen waiting “fake, fake disgusting news."
His full remarks are below:
People call it Britain, they call it Great Britain, they used to call it England. I was asked to have tea with the queen, who is incredible by the way, incredible. I had landed and I'm on the ground and I'm waiting with the king's and with the queen's guards — wonderful people. I'm waiting! I was about 15 minutes early and I'm waiting with my wife, and that's fine. Hey, it's the queen, right? We can wait. But I'm a little early.So, I then go up and meet the queen, and she is fantastic. We then go up and we have tea. And I didn't know this — it was supposed to last 15 minutes, but it lasted like an hour. Because we got along. And she liked our first lady and our first lady liked her. Here was the story by the fake news: The president was 15 minutes late for the queen... Wrong!
Trump's comments were immediately derided by those who said he was, in fact, late for his meeting with the queen.
As the rally continued, Trump praised himself for his performance during June's summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which many criticized as more of an opportunity to legitimize a totalitarian regime than an actual endeavor to reform policy toward the nation historians have referred to as the "Hermit Kingdom."
“I said the media is gonna treat me finally so good. So good. I mean, it’s gonna be so great, baby. I’m looking so forward to getting up tomorrow and reading those dying papers,” Trump said.
He added:
And what do I read? What do I read? So I left three months ago. What do I read? They’ve been working on this stuff for 75 years. [Barack] Obama didn’t do anything. In all fairness, other administrations did nothing. They’d been working on it for so many decades.What do I read? I left three months ago. ‘Donald Trump isn’t moving fast enough.’ Can you believe? I’m not moving fast enough. Oh boy, what a group. What a group.
The president also came under fire for his claims that Russia did not want him in the White House, a remark no doubt meant to sow distrust for Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into whether Trump, with the help of the Kremlin, swayed the 2016 presidential election.
"I’ll tell you what, Russia is very unhappy that Trump won, that I can tell you. But I got along great with [Vladimir] Putin," he said, touting his summit with the Russian leader last month which sparked controversy when, while speaking at a press conference alongside Putin, he sided with Russia over the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia launched cyber attacks against the United States during the 2016 election cycle.
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