Apr. 28, 2026, 8:44 PM EDT

There is a notable absence in King Charles’ visit to the U.S.: the king’s younger son, Prince Harry, and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.

Charles and Queen Camilla’s itinerary for their four-day state visit is packed. The most prominent items on the agenda are the king’s address to Congress and the state dinner Tuesday in Washington. But there was also tea with President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump, a tour of the White House beehives and a garden-party reception at the British ambassador’s residence on Monday.

While the schedule will take the royal couple to New York and Virginia for events, including a wreath-laying at the 9/11 memorial, there is nothing scheduled for California, where Harry, Meghan and their children live.

There are several reasons for this.

Family fracture

Harry and Meghan made global headlines in 2020 when they announced they were stepping back from their roles as “working royals.” The changes that followed included the couple losing access to their taxpayer-funded security details. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021Meghan talked about her mental health challenges amid palace life and said a royal relative — whom she did not name — asked during her first pregnancy about the likely skin color of her unborn child.

Buckingham Palace responded with a statement on behalf of Harry’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, then the monarch:

The whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan.
The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning. While some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately. Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved family members.

Awkward visits home

Harry and Meghan returned to Britain in June 2022 to attend Platinum Jubilee events marking Elizabeth’s 70 years on the throne — but were not present at all of the public celebrations.

The couple flew back to attend memorial events after Queen Elizabeth died in September 2022. That same year, it emerged that Harry had sued the British government seeking for his publicly financed security to be reinstated.

Harry, who is fifth in the line of succession to the throne, flew to Britain again in early 2024 after his father announced he has cancer.

The prince has made few visits to his native country since then, with most trips involving his legal case over security and separate lawsuits against British publishers.

‘Spare’ makes a splash

In January 2023, Harry published a bombshell memoir, “Spare,” detailing his experiences growing up in the royal family, his marriage to Meghan and the death of his mother, Princess Diana. Harry’s account of a physical fight with his brother, Prince Williamand criticism of his stepmotherCamilla, were thought to have inflamed grievances.

Harry later revealed that King Charles would not speak to him because of his lawsuit against the government over security. After he lost an appeal in his security lawsuit last May, he said in a BBC interview that he “would love reconciliation with my family.”

Noting that some relatives “will never forgive me for writing a book,” Harry said, “Life is precious. I don’t know how much longer my father has. He won’t speak to me because of this security stuff. But it would be nice to reconcile.”

There have been signs of thaw. Aides for Harry and the king were photographed meeting near Buckingham Palace last summerwhich some media outlets reported as a step toward reconciliation. Father and son met for tea in September. Another government review of security requirements for Harry and his family was begun late last year.

Stealing the spotlight

Another issue is Harry and Meghan’s knack for making headlines. Harry traveled to Ukraine in September to promote his Invictus Games Foundation on behalf of wounded veterans. He spoke about his family on the trip. In a visit to Kyiv last week, the prince called for “American leadership” on Ukraine — remarks that Trump quickly panned as “not speaking for the U.K.” Although Trump has praised Harry’s brother, Prince William, as “wonderful” and a “remarkable son” to Charles, the president said last year that Meghan is “terrible” and called Harry “whipped.”

The absence of a specific meeting with Harry and Meghan may not be a personal snub. The British government requested the king and queen undertake this official trip. The agenda may reflect some of the king and queen’s interests, but it was organized around government priorities — not personal ones.

But given Trump’s past criticism and the years-old royal rift, the couple’s presence could be expected to distract from coverage of the king’s visit.

Autumn Brewington is a senior opinion editor at MS NOW. A longtime editor at The Washington Post, she oversaw the paper’s op-ed page for more than seven years. She also wrote a Post blog and newsletter about the British royal family. She writes about royalty on Substack at http://autumnbrewington.substack.com.

Apr. 28, 2026, 7:00 PM EDT

For months, legal circles have been abuzz with rumors that the Justice Department, undeterred by the dismissal of its first case against former FBI Director James Comey and its inability to secure a second indictment on the same allegations, would indict Comey again for other reasons.

On Tuesday, those rumors became reality when the DOJ indicted Comey in the Eastern District of North Carolina because of his May 2025 social media post of a picture of seashells arranged to read “86 47.” For that, the DOJ has indicted Comey for threatening the life of a president and further, for making a threat to injure another person — also the president — via “interstate communications.” Each count is punishable by a sizable fine, no more than five years in prison or both.

While some interpreted that the “86” meant to eliminate or kill, others maintained it simply meant to remove or cancel. Comey has claimed he viewed the shells that he came upon during a beach walk as a “political message,” and that he opposes violence of any kind.

Despite Trump’s longstanding fixation on Comey, which the former FBI director proved to a federal court through a nearly 60-page chart documenting Trump’s social media posts about him, the newest efforts to punish Comey should not be viewed in isolation.

Consider other DOJ developments within the last 24 hours:

• Late Monday night, in a filing that read like a Trump-written social media screed, not a legal argument, the DOJ demanded that the federal judge overseeing the White House ballroom case reverse a ruling blocking above-ground construction on the ballroom. The DOJ filing was both curious and unnecessary because a federal appeals court has stayed that ruling for at least several weeks, meaning construction can resume as the appeal continues. Nonetheless, the DOJ filing — rife with capitalized words, exclamation points, political epithets and unsupported factual assertions — not only suggested Trump cannot continue construction, but framed the ballroom project as “vital to our National Security, and the Safety of all Presidents of the United States, both current and future, their families, staff, and cabinet members.”

• Then, early Tuesday, multiple media outlets reported that the FBI and the DOJ executed search warrants on 20-plus businesses in Minneapolis as part of a wide-reaching federal fraud investigation into the use of federal social services funds. Trump himself has not only commented on that investigation, a departure from usual presidential protocol, but he has also publicly accused several of the state’s top Democratic officials — Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and Rep. Ilhan Omar — all of whom have been his political foils, if not his electoral opponents, of being “complicit” in that fraud.

• Later, in Maryland federal court, the DOJ indicted a former senior aide to the former National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases head, Dr. Anthony Fauci. There, the government alleged not only that David M. Morens destroyed and/or evaded creating government records by using personal emails, but also that he conspired with Chinese researchers to counter the emerging thesis that Covid-19 was unleashed through a lab leak, thereby limiting the information available to decision-makers, including Trump. In a press release announcing the chargesacting Attorney General Todd Blanche alleged that the aide “deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19” before giving a hint about what has really undergirded the case: His belief that NIH officials were obligated to “provide honest, well-ground facts and advice,” not “advance their own personal or ideological agendas.”

And finally, on Tuesday afternoon, the DOJ unsealed the bare-bones, three-page Comey indictment.

Collectively, these developments highlight that there is a new sheriff in town. And indeed,Blanchewho appears to be publicly auditioning to become Trump’s permanent attorney general, has advanced investigations and cases against the president’s enemies and detractors as rapidly as he has aggressively.

In particular, the federal statute that criminalizes threats against the president is not a judicially blank slate; rather, it was interpreted by the Supreme Court in 1969, when it reversed the conviction of an antiwar protester who said if he were forced to carry a rifle as an enlisted man, “the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.”

There, the court noted that to sustain a conviction under that statute, the DOJ has to prove “a true ‘threat,”’ as distinguished from the “vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials” that are sometimes part of our political discourse. To the court, the protester’s statements were not a real threat, but a “crude [and] offensive method of stating a political opposition to the President.”

Against that backdrop, the new indictment against Comey hardly seems to be a slam dunk for the DOJ — or Blanche.

But if the process itself is the punishment, and the thing the man Blanche has described as the DOJ’s “boss” craves, Blanche achieved multiple wins — and not just a new Comey indictment — on a random Tuesday in April.

And days like this might be enough to keep him at the attorney general’s desk.

Lisa Rubin is MS NOW’s senior legal reporter and a former litigator.

Apr. 28, 2026, 6:52 PM EDT

In an episode of the “High Level Conversations” podcast that premiered on June 30, 2024then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told host 19Keys (also known as Jibrial Muhammad), “Every Black kid is now, just as a standard, put on Adderall, [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors]benzos, which are known to induce violence.” Kennedy, who later ended his campaign, endorsed President Donald Trump and later became his health and human services secretary, went on to reveal a dystopian vision: “And those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented, to live in a community where there’ll be no cell phones, no screens, you’ll actually have to talk to people.”

Appropriately, Kennedy’s threat of reparenting Black children on “wellness farms” was met last week with intense pushback when he testified multiple times on Capitol Hill last week. Sen. Angela AlsobrooksD-Md.; Sen. Rafael WarnockD-Ga.; and Rep. Terri SewellD-Ala., all expressed outrage. California Gov. Gavin Newsoma Democrat who’s considered likely to run for president in 2028, also demanded answers from Kennedy regarding his horribly racist remark.

Initially, Kennedy vehemently denied making it. But on Wednesday, he offered a non-apologetic apology.

“I would have to see, hear that recording,” Kennedy told Alsobrooks after she quoted his remark to him. “I have no memory of saying anything like that.”

“If I said it, I apologize but I’d have to see the transcript,” he added.

As public health professionals, we demand that apology, even if Kennedy manages to avoid looking at the transcript. His words were offensive and inexcusable.

Kennedy misrepresented studies that have made some connections between violent behaviors and varied psychiatric medications in children. New-age antipsychotic medications, in fact, are shown to reduce aggressionnot induce aggression. And Black children are often underdiagnosed, if not misdiagnosed. Sewell, to her credit, used her time questioning Kennedy to call out a truth far more nefarious: the long history of the government separating families of color. To be clear, we are not talking about separations that were the collateral damage of other policies, but explicit policies of separation.

From slavery to Indian boarding school to immigration enforcement policies to even mass incarceration and the rules governing child protective service agencies, removing children from their families — if not also their culture, language and history — is what America does. Kennedy’s remark about Black children being reparented, then, was not pulled out of thin air. It was his expressed desire to repeat some of the worst of this country’s history.

The period of enslavement in the United States, during which half of all children were ripped from their families, begets a still-visible pattern for the removal of Black children from parental care. Indeed, half of all children held in juvenile facilities before or after criminal trial are Black, while half of all Black children will have an investigation opened by child protective services. As a result, Black children are removed from their homes at a disproportionate rate relative to their peers. The idea, then, to reparent an untold number of Black children may sound like an isolated and strange suggestion from a political candidate-turned-government public health official, but our various branches of government have been removing Black children from their families.

But not just Black children. At this point we are more likely to think of Latino families when we think of children being separated from their parents. In 2018, the Trump administration made it a felony to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, and, in a cruel effort to discourage Central American migrants from traveling north, the administration separated hundreds of parents from their children. Because no investment was made in tracking the families, many of those parents have yet to be reunited with their children. And while family separation as a border enforcement policy was halted that summer due to public pressure, mass deportation efforts across the country have continued to remove parents from their homes, forcing some children into the same child protective services system that have separated so many Black families.

There’s more history, still. Church- and state-run boarding schools resulted in the removal of more than 100,000 Indigenous children from their families between the late 19^th and early 20^th century. This reparenting attempt to force Indigenous youth to adopt the morals and character of a “superior” culture resulted in a host of negative psychological-, cognitive- and health-related outcomes. The horrors of those schools have been made evident in the unidentified remains that have been unearthed during recent land excavations. The inability of so many Indigenous children to make it out alive, and the schools’ pattern of prohibiting cultural expression, has resulted in intergenerational trauma within Indigenous communities.

Life in the home, with parents, siblings, cousins and larger community, is where children learn the language of their culture. And, perhaps most pertinent to the current discussion, it is where they learn about the power structures that have oppressed their people and learn how to do something about them.

Children of color deserve to live in homes where these traditions live on, in communities where they are seen and in a country where their existence is not perceived as a threat. They should be in the capable hands of parents and families who are not written off as negligent for following a pediatrician’s advice. As public health research has shown time and time again, individuals are best able to thrive when they are allowed to be with their families — families that are healthy, happy and whole.

These children don’t need to be reparented. They already have exactly the parents they need.