President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump will meet Queen Elizabeth II for tea on Friday afternoon, marking the latest in a long history of meetings between U.S. heads of state and the British monarch.
On the second day of his working visit to Britain, the U.S. president is due to meet the queen in one of her drawing rooms at Windsor Castle.
“She is a tremendous woman,” Trump told The Sun newspaper in an interview published Thursday, before adding: “I really look forward to meeting her. I think she represents her country so well.”
“If you think of it, for so many years she has represented her country, she has never really made a mistake. You don’t see, like, anything embarrassing. She is just an incredible woman,” he said.
The queen has met with almost every U.S. president in her 66-year reign, with Lyndon B. Johnson the sole exception because he did not visit Britain during his time in office.
The significance of a meeting with the British monarch at Windsor Castle is that Trump follows in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan in 1982, Geroge W. Bush in 2008 and Barack Obama in 2016.
Windsor Castle was also the venue for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s royal wedding earlier this summer.
“He’s already won, he is meeting with the queen and his lifelong wish has been to meet with Her Majesty,” Mary Jo Jacobi, a former aide to President Ronald Reagan and a member of the George H.W. Bush administration, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Friday.