“I’m not a fan of hers,” US President Donald Trump recently said of Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, as she is now known after she and her husband Prince Harry were compelled to cease using the style of “Royal Highness” earlier this year.

The day before, the degraded royal couple, who now dwell in Southern California for nauseatingly well-known reasons, had released a joint video produced by Time, ostensibly to urge Americans to vote in their forthcoming presidential election. Despite some serious back pedalling by the Sussexes’ public relations team after the fact, there was little doubt about which candidate they expect American voters to favour.

Sitting with Meghan on a park bench on their $14.7 million property in Santa Barbara, Harry moralised that “it’s vital that we reject hate speech, misinformation, and online negativity,” habits in which the mainstream media only ever accuse one presidential candidate of engaging. Meghan, whose expertise as a political analyst has heretofore eluded me, insisted that “every four years, we are told the same thing: that this is the most important election of our lifetime. But this one is.”

For anyone who has not been living at the North Pole, there can only be one reason why the Duchess might think so. “When we vote,” she instructed the countrymen she left behind to marry a foreign prince, “our values are put into action, and our voices are heard.” Paraphrasing a political slogan popular on one side of the current political divide, she continued, “Your voice is a reminder that you matter, because you do.”

Meghan seems fated to become a shrill and undesirable Uber-Karen whom people avoid at parties

In an earlier broadcast conversation with the 86-year-old feminist icon Gloria Steinem, Meghan swooned over Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris for also being multiracial. She then admonished those who fail to vote this November that they will be “complicit” in the election’s outcome, especially if it has the effrontery to contradict her once royal wishes. In case there was any further doubt, in 2016 Meghan called Trump “divisive” and said that he “has made it easy to see that you don’t really want that kind of world,” i.e. one in which he was president. When Trump made a state visit to the United Kingdom in May 2019, Meghan was curiously not scheduled to meet him, even though Harry, Will, Kate, and other principal members of “the Firm” did.

Neither Harry, who grew up in the world of royal protocol, nor Meghan, who functioned so awkwardly in it that she had to flee her husband’s kingdom, seemed particularly aware of what happened the last time British Royals tried to tell Americans what to do in politics. Nor were they mindful that even their diminished station carries strong prohibitions against intervening in the politics of any country. Meghan’s earlier statements about US politics sent commentator Piers Morgan into such a fit that he called for Queen Elizabeth formally to strip the couple of all their titles, an unprecedented act in modern times, including for Meghan and Harry’s nearest analogues, the Anglo-American Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who spent their multidecade post-royal period prudently keeping their mouths shut.

Cooler heads than Morgan’s have simply observed that Meghan and Harry failed to adhere to royal protocol and “crossed a line” that still delineates their residual role. Buckingham Palace’s official view of the video was that Harry “is not a working member of the Royal Family and any comments he makes are made in a personal capacity.” The Palace had nothing to say about Meghan, who has been all but unpersoned at the Court of St. James.

Hardly anyone takes the Sussexes seriously or cares about what they do, say, or think

American reactions have been more bemused. Trump’s campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski wryly adapted his boss’s best-known slogan to declare that Meghan and Harry “made Britain great again by leaving. I hope they do the same for us.” But after more than two years of viewing their relationship as gossip fodder following a royal wedding that seemed like a weird parody of Will and Kate’s more dignified nuptials, hardly anyone takes the Sussexes seriously or cares about what they do, say, or think. I would be astonished if even one American voter casts a ballot this November solely because a British prince and Hollywood actress told them to in a contrived internet video.

Back home, their vulgar and excruciatingly American attempts to leverage Harry’s royal birth into a commercial brand and charitable foundation, both under the risible name “Sussex Royal,” swiftly ran afoul of the Royal Household’s rules, reportedly in concert with the Queen’s wish to push them as far out as possible without creating open disharmony. This humiliating grandmotherly rebuff, communicated through courtiers who by all accounts already despised Meghan, made the Sussexes look witless and spoiled and reduced them to ordinary mid-range celebrities whose vaunted stab at financial independence now depends on Hollywood connections left over from the Duchess’s career as a supporting actress in a mediocre television series.

On a personal level, Meghan comes off as a pathological narcissist who refused to adapt to the customs of her husband’s family and country and instead tried to insist that they be refashioned to accommodate her. She indulged in the trite manners of an obnoxious Disney princess who ultimately teaches her detractors some hokey lesson about how very good she truly is, and then tried to play the race card so transparently that no one fell for it. According to a biographer, Meghan is so comically delusional about what she believes is her intrinsic value and mass appeal that she is seriously considering running for president herself at some future time.

Their aura of entitlement has brought the Royal Family to a new nadir

Harry entered adulthood with a plucky attitude and occasional bad boy image, but now looks like a lost victim of emotional abuse who gets something from Meghan that is so essential to his internal needs that he willingly puts up with her endless bullshit, became alienated from his entire family and all of its traditions, went into de facto exile, and degenerated from a confident prince who served as Captain General of the Royal Marines to a global laughing stock who sputters maladroit soundbites on command. As he portentously said before their wedding, “Whatever Meghan wants, Meghan gets.” However unintentionally, the Sussexes’ strange video revealed this all too well. Meghan is by far the more outspoken, while Harry looks withdrawn, tense, fidgety, and literally pushed aside. Royal watchers agree. The journalist Dan Wootton reviewed Harry’s performance as that of an “obedient, nodding wannabe first man” who is “chipping in on Meghan Markle’s pet projects with perfectly scripted woke-isms doused in British princely charm.” Calling Harry “the very definition of a henpecked husband,” Wootton’s colleague Dawn Neesom mournfully agreed, concluding that he “is never going to stand up to her.”

Neesom may yet be wrong. These types of relationships do often fail. Frequently, the overridden male chafes, remembers what it was like to have self-esteem, resents being unappreciated, and, to the cheers of all who care about him, finally dumps the harridan. This tends to happen after her beauty fades, leaving her with no other qualities to hold his attention. Meghan is now nearly forty and has clearly seen better days. Her looks register all the stress of having disastrously failed in a major role for which she was totally unsuited, and of having been rejected by a family she desperately wanted to be a member of. She now seems fated to become a shrill and undesirable Uber-Karen whom people avoid at parties. It is needless to say that divorce is no longer taboo, even among Royals. But it will not help Meghan’s cause that the celebrity milieu the Sussexes inhabit is utterly obsessed with youth and abounds with temptations to which a callow man who already walked away from the world’s most famous dynasty may yield. Ironically, Meghan’s future in such an eventuality will likely echo her late mother-in-law Princess Diana’s unenviable late life existence as a tacky pop culture icon whose adversity resonates with other emotionally damaged people.

Even Harry and Meghan’s diminished station carries strong prohibitions against intervening in the politics of any country

In the meantime, Meghan and Harry’s cringeworthy lack of self-awareness will continue to harm the institution from which they have fled. Along with Prince Andrew’s lamentable interview performance in discussing the late accused sex fiend Jeffrey Epstein, their aura of entitlement has brought the Royal Family to a new nadir. The consequences now are more palpable than they have been at any time in living memory. In just the two years since Meghan and Harry were married, pro-monarchy sentiment in Britain has declined from 70 to 62 percent among a depressed population facing yet more mass lockdowns while the Sussexes continue to tell people what to do from the comfortable privacy of their new California mansion. The prime minster of one crown realm, the Caribbean island nation of Barbados, has just announced that it will remove the Queen as head of state by the end of 2021. Jamaica’s newly elected leftist government endorses a similar constitutional change, supported by 55 percent of the population. An identical percentage of New Zealanders also now favour a native head of state, while recent polls in Canada and Australia show strong pluralities preferring one. Within the UK itself, Scottish independence is again firmly on the agenda and rising in popularity. And it is hard to imagine that the rioters now putting critical race theory and other radical egalitarian ideas that Meghan endorses into action in British cities will merely idle outside the gates of Buckingham Palace after toppling all the statues that displease them.

Trump concluded his comments on the video by saying of Harry, “I wish him a lot of luck, because he’s going to need it.” Trump knows a thing or two about women, but at thirty-six Harry is still young enough to mend his family relationships and take his life in a worthier direction than providing Netflix content and supporting his ageing wife’s lightweight activism and dopey virtue-signalling. He may yet find a way out of his woke fog and, perhaps with the help of a prim but gracious marquess’s daughter, again be of some use to his family and country before it is too late.