President Biden to Meet Queen Elizabeth During U.K. Visit

(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will meet Queen Elizabeth II during the U.S. leader’s inaugural foreign trip later this month, Buckingham Palace said.

The June 13 meeting at Windsor Castle will follow Biden’s trip to the Group of Seven leaders’ summit in Cornwall. The U.S. president has not left the country since his Jan. 20 inauguration, with travel limited due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden will be the 13th U.S. president to meet the queen, who has spent time with every U.S. leader - with the exception of Lyndon Johnson -since Harry Truman. The meeting with Truman in Washington was in 1951, before she had ascended to the throne.

The queen regards Windsor as her home, rather than Buckingham Palace, and has been resident there for much of the pandemic.

The meeting will be the first between the queen and a U.S. president since the death of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, in April. It will also be the first meeting since the March television interview between Oprah Winfrey and Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, and her husband, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, in which the couple criticized the monarchy and suggested that a member of the royal family had made racist comments.

At the time, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said it took “courage” for the couple “to come forward and speak about their own struggles with mental health and tell their own personal story.”

Following his audience with the queen, Biden will travel to Brussels for meetings with European leaders and then to Geneva for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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