Everyone wants to meet Meghan Markle. You want to meet her. I want to meet her. My sister—who barely pays attention to pop-culture and may not even recognize her—wants to meet her. So I’m not exactly surprised Kendall Jenner and Rita Ora were reportedly keen on having an “audience” (a.k.a meeting) with Markle when they were all in the same building last Monday (December 10) at the Fashion Awards in London. No one was is immune to the Duchess of Sussex’s charm—not even a Kardashian-Jenner, apparently.
I can totally picture how a meeting with Kendall Jenner and Meghan Markle would go, by the way. Jenner would look tall and gorgeous and say something like, “My sisters and I are all obsessed with you.” Markle would then smile and giggle, while touching her baby bump, and say, “Thank you! Buy this cookbook!” (Dialogue courtesy of my imagination.)
PHOTO: Getty Images
Unfortunately, a meeting like this—or any meeting, for that matter—didn’t happen. According to TMZ, security around Markle was so tight at the Fashion Awards that no one could get close enough to say hello. The outlet reports Royalty Protection officers employed something called “Royal Movement,” meaning that whenever Markle was walking, all stairs and hallways in the venue had to be empty. Imagine being so iconic that guards clear out a stairway just because you want to walk to the vending machine and grab a Fanta—or, in Markle’s case, probably mineral water or something equally as fancy.
PHOTO: Getty Images
PHOTO: Getty Images
Jenner, Ora, and Victoria and David Beckham were among the stars reportedly “up in arms” about Markle’s security. Who knows if that’s true, but I’d 100 percent understand if they were bummed about not scoring a chat with Markle. I mean, imagine if Ora met Markle, slipped her a copy of her new album Phoenix, and she loved it? Hello, chart domination! What a missed opportunity.
In all sincerity, though, Markle should stream Phoenix. It’s full of bops. Better luck next time, guys.
Meghan Markle managed to remain cool, calm, and collected in what might’ve otherwise escalated to a scary situation.
As reported by People, Markle was on a solo outing during her royal tour stop in Suva, Fiji on Wednesday afternoon. (Prince Harry was off exploring a nearby forest.) While visiting a market to meet with a group of local vendors to discuss the United Nations Women’s project “Markets for Change,” her security detail soon deemed the environment too unsafe for her presence and escorted her out after just six minutes. She was originally set to stay for about 20 minutes.
Her exit reportedly stemmed from crowd management issues, Kensington Palace confirmed to the Associated Press, as the market filled up with more people than the detail was prepared to handle. “It was hot, humid and uncomfortably busy and there were far larger crowds than expected,” an aide explained to The Daily Mail. “Meghan met everyone she was meant to meet and left. There would have been a lot of people who would have been keen to meet her but she did met those who had hoped to. On advice she was taken out due to crowd management issue.”
Prior to Markle exploring the markets, she spent the morning giving her first solo speech on the royal tour at the University of the South Pacific, where she praised Fiji’s commitment to higher education and reminisced about her own college days at Northwestern University. “As a university graduate, I know the personal feeling of pride and excitement that comes with attending university,” she told the crowd. “From the moment you receive your acceptance letter to the exams you spend countless late nights studying for, the lifelong friendships you make with your fellow alumni to the moment that you receive your diploma, the journey of higher education is an incredible, impactful and pivotal one. It was through scholarships, financial aid programs and work-study where my earnings from a job on campus went directly towards my tuition—that I was able to attend university. And, without question, it was worth every effort.”
While Markle and Prince Harry’s royal tour still has a few more days ahead of itself, if you don’t see as much of Markle, don’t be too surprised. The duchess has apparently cut down on some of her appearances for the remainder of the tour, owing to her pregnancy. Everyone needs some self-care, even the royals.
In what many observers are calling a thinly veiled threat, President Donald Trump on Monday afternoon took his feud with California Congresswoman (and Glamour Woman of the Year) Maxine Waters to a new level with a tweet telling her to “be careful” what she wished for.
“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up,” she said. “And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
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Waters’ remarks came after White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted that she had been refused service at a restaurant because of her position in the Trump administration.
Now President Trump has responded via Twitter, writing, “Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!”
Waters has yet to comment on the most recent tweet, but she previously spoke to Glamour about her thoughts on Trump’s character. “The most upsetting part is discovering that the person who won the election and became the president of the United States of America is a man who has no good values. His character astounds me,” Waters said in 2017. “I can’t believe that we have a president who would lie, who would distort, and who does not appear to have an appreciation for government and how it works.”
Rep. Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat who holds a leadership position on the Congressional Black Caucus, told Glamour in a phone interview that the president’s Twitter attack on Waters struck her as “malicious” and “over the top.”
Clarke said that by her reading of Trump’s message, “It is very evident from what he said that he is wishing her ill… There is an implied harm that could visit her because of her statements.”
The congresswoman called it “beneath the office of the presidency to [imply] that someone could be harmed because they make a statement about what is taking place in this administration,” she said.
Clarke said she planned to discuss the Trump tweet with the CBC as well as the Congressional Caucus on Black Women & Girls: “We all have to sit up and take note. Women need to sit up and take note. He’s found ways to silence women throughout his candidacy and his presidency.”
Asked if she’d ever seen a president make a comparable statement in the past, Clarke replied, “Never, never — we are in uncharted territory where the breaking of norms [is] becoming the norm. The lack of civility, the lack of true respect for one another is leading to the point where the antagonism and the hostility is palpable.”
Additionally, Clarke said, “We have to talk to Capitol Police to ensure that there is security for Maxine Waters” given that “we’ve already seen unhinged individuals in this climate” who are willing to commit acts of violence. In one example, Clarke noted that Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson got extra security in response to death threats she received after a public disagreement with Trump last year.
As many rush to Waters’ defense, others have condemned her statements about confronting members of the Trump administration, calling it “harassment.” Prior to Trump’s latest comments, Democratic congressional leader Nancy Pelosi tweeted out a story about Waters’ comments and—without naming her directly— wrote, “In the crucial months ahead, we must strive to make America beautiful again. Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable. As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea.”
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey made similar comments in a Monday interview with NPR when asked about Waters encouraging Americans to protest the Trump administration at every turn.
“You know, protest is good, and I’ve been encouraging people there be a lot of protests at the Mall and cities all across America protesting this really – these morally despicable actions by the Trump administration separating folks from families,” he said. “But this is also a time, I believe, as Americans who seek to create a beloved community, who believe in a more what I consider a radical love, love thy neighbor – no exceptions. And whether that person is coming over the border or whether that person is somebody who votes differently than you, we’ve got to be a nation that treats each other with our highest ideals.”
As for Trump, this is not the first time he has used Twitter to warn someone to “be careful,” Yahoo! News managing editor Colin Campbell points out.
However none of those instances used the word “harm” in the framing of the tweet, (it should also be noted that Waters did not implicitly call for any harm to come to administration officials in her speech), one denotation that many say is the clear difference between a petty insult and an actual threat.
