That was the start of an evening of lively conversation between the late Queen and Trump. “I was in the groove,” he told Woody Johnson, a billionaire businessman and then-US ambassador, the next morning. Johnson, who had known Trump for decades, offered: “My own judgment is, after the first four years and maybe to this day, of all the people that he met, the Queen had the most special relationship, the most special impact on him.”
Later, the president gave me a rundown on their conversation that night.
“I said: ‘So could I ask you who was your favourite president?’”
The Queen replied: “Why? They were all so good.”
“I know, but did you like Ronald Reagan the best?” Trump asked.
“Oh, yes, I liked him very much, but they were all good.”
“Oh, well, what about Nixon?”
“Oh, he was excellent.”
“So what do you mean you liked them all?” Trump pressed.
“I liked them all. I can’t say anything bad about any of them. They were great.”
“OK, let’s go to prime ministers. Who was your favourite prime minister? It had to be Churchill, right?”
“No, no, no. He was wonderful, Winston. But they were all so good. They worked so hard. They were very different, but they worked so hard. They were all so good.”
Trump was dazzled by her skill at charming deflection. “I said to myself, how genius is this?” he said. “I couldn’t get her to say a bad thing about anybody.”
Trump could hardly find the words to describe his conversations with her. “She had a way of convincing people in the most non-controversial way,” he said. That trait was “sort of the opposite of me”, he added ruefully. “You would leave, and you wouldn’t even know that she was in favour of something, and yet she would convince you that there was a certain way to go.”
Barack Obama had also been struck by her discussion, and dissection, of the leaders she had encountered over decades. During his own state visit on May 24 2011, he had asked her about every president she had known: “‘What about Eisenhower?’ ‘What about Kennedy?’” While she didn’t rank them, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, said it was clear she liked some more than others. She was astute and pithy in assessing the foreign leaders she had met. At the time, the Arab Spring was convulsing the Middle East, and the Obama administration had found itself struggling to deal with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Queen’s perfunctory comment: “Bibi. Difficult.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.telegraph.co.uk ’
