Your favourite half-British president

We could win bigly by courting Donald Trump

We went to Skye last year on a family holiday – an amazing island, beautiful scenery, so many great people. Towards the end of our trip we visited Dunvegan Castle, ancestral home of the mighty Clan MacLeod. It featured much about the history of the family and its famous sons and daughters, although I noticed that it failed to mention perhaps the most influential and important MacLeod of all time – Donald J. Trump.

Trump’s mother Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was born on the Isle of Lewis, and while the vast majority of American presidents have some British ancestry, Trump is the first to have a British parent since Woodrow Wilson, whose mother came from Carlisle. He is also sentimental about our country in a way that other states would take huge advantage of, but which Britain’s rulers are intent on failing to do.

On his campaign plane between rallies, the once-and-future president reminisced about meeting the Royal Family and visiting their palaces: ‘so beautiful… the most beautiful places in the world. There are no places like this’. Of King Charles, he said ‘hopefully he’s going to be well, because he’s a good person, Camilla is fantastic. You get to know them so well – here’s your favourite president with the Queen. She was unbelievable; we had a really good relationship.’

As Niall Gooch noted, the ‘vibe he gives here is one of those good-natured super-Anglophile US tourists you meet who are having a delightful time in England and love all the old castles, and are about to visit the village in Norfolk whence their ancestors came in 1692 (I love them).’ I love them, too.

A warm British welcome might sound like a contradiction in terms, but foreign visitors are very impressed with British institutions and history – it is a genuine form of soft power that can be useful in diplomacy (even if I think the idea of soft power without hard, financial power is worthless).

Trump loves golf, the most famous invention of his maternal homeland. He even likes football, and was apparently half-decent at ‘soccer’ at High School. As a child I remember watching him help with the League Cup draw on Saint and Greavsie, and there is even an urban legend that he played for Wolves as a youngster, which hasn’t ever been verified and frankly sounds very untrue, yet I choose to believe.