When Air Force One rumbled on to the tarmac outside Glasgow on Friday night, cheers could be heard from a group of spectators who had gathered to watch the show. The US president proceeded to take a few questions from the press — declaring that immigration is “killing Europe” — before heading to Trump Turnberry, one of his two golf courses in Scotland.
It was a perfect example of his approach to governing: business meets politics. The president is here in “serious Scotland” in part to check on his golf empire. Yet along the way, he will, like a medieval king, hold audiences. In this case that means various meetings with world leaders: Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Sir Keir Starmer will both head to Turnberry to pay their respects.
Trump took to the Turnberry the golf course on Saturday
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There’s also a personal angle to all this. As the president himself put it back in 2008 when he was embroiled in a planning dispute over his golf course in Aberdeen, “If it weren’t for my mother, would I have walked away from this site? I think probably I would have, yes. The reason I got involved was because of the feeling I have for Scotland.”
His love of the UK was sparked by his Gaelic-speaking mother who hailed from the village of Tong in the Outer Hebrides. “He’s extremely fond of Scotland and takes great pride in his Scottish roots,” says Douglas Murray, the author, whose grandfather came from the same island as Trump’s mother. “His mother, who I knew a bit, was a wonderful island woman so he just has a very deep and moving relationship with the place.”
Trump at the house in Tong where his mother grew up. From left, his sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, and their cousins Willie Murray, Alasdair Murray and Calum MacLeod with his wife, Chrisie. Trump’s mother’s maiden name was MacLeod
ANDREW MILLIGAN/PA
Trump’s allies say these days it also extends to the royal family — and golf.
• Trump’s links to Scotland — from golf courses to family history
With Trump back again in September for an unprecedented second state visit and JD Vance due in the UK in a few weeks’ time, one Republican calls it “a Maga British summer”. The vice-president will be in the Cotswolds on a short summer break. “It’s non-trivial that Usha [Vance’s wife] spent a happy year at Cambridge,” says one insider of the appeal of the UK. The Vances were in London before the 2024 US election, being given a personal tour of the British Museum by George Osborne, its chairman.
It’s certainly a contrast to what came before. In 2011 Barack Obama took time out to visit his ancestral home in Moneygall, Ireland (announcing that the Guinness tastes better in Ireland than anywhere else in the world).
President Obama in Moneygall in 2011
EPA
In 2023 Joe Biden, embarked on a tour of Ireland, with the UK only getting a brief look-in. Rishi Sunak had to go to Northern Ireland to meet him at the airport. But the main thrust was Biden, along with his son, addressing tens of thousands of people at his ancestral town in Co Mayo.
As a new book on the US election, 2024: How Trump retook the White House and the Democrats lost America, recounts: “It was the largest and most jubilant crowd Biden had ever assembled as president — a dream setting to launch his re-election campaign. The only problem was that Biden could not be elected there. He was in Ireland, not the United States.”
While some Turnberry locals have said they are hoping for big, beautiful Trump tips, few expect quite such a reaction for Trump and Vance in the UK: their biggest supporters remain at home. Yet the trips speak to Maga’s anglophilia, a phenomenon that puzzles many. It’s also one that creates opportunity and some risk for Sir Keir Starmer and the UK. While the new administration may be very critical at times of Britain, they have a stronger affiliation with the UK than any White House in decades.
In the Eighties, the special relationship between Reagan and Thatcher — described as political soulmates — arguably changed the course of history.
“They’d be on the cavalier side in the Civil War. They are Tory cavaliers standing up to the ravages of woke republicanism,” says Lord Glasman, the only Labour politician to be invited to the inauguration in January, of the current administration. “They are obsessed with the West — including the decline of the West — and really when they say the West they don’t mean France or Germany. This history is completely informed by England.”
That doesn’t mean that they are uncritical. It’s not that unusual to hear administration staffers refer to Britain as a “special project” — the idea being that once America is great again, they can move on to helping with the UK. It was only Elon Musk who wanted to help Tommy Robinson. Instead, the more mainstream Maga view is to see Nigel Farage’s party as a way to improve the UK. The Reform leader has long cultivated close links with Trump. After the 2016 election, Farage became the first British politician to visit the president elect, travelling to Trump Tower in New York along with some of his allies including his former adviser Raheem Kassam.
Before the visit, Farage and Kassam had discussed asking Trump to return the Churchill bust to the Oval Office after Obama removed it. Yet other topics took over. Then as they were about to leave, Kassam asked him at the exit door for a “cheeky favour”.
“He paused and said, ‘Would that mean a lot to you?’ Yes sir. ‘Would that mean a lot to your country?’ I said it would mean the world to my country and he said, ‘OK, we’ll do that’.” Others such as the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon had also pushed for its return.
Theresa May met Trump early in his first presidency. The bust of Sir Winston Churchill is back in the Oval Office of the White House
STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has regularly attacked the UK over free speech, as he has Europe. The state department sent a five-person delegation to the UK in March to investigate free speech concerns, with US officials meeting British anti-abortion activists.
The vice-president, meanwhile, is expected to fuse holiday with work during his stay in Britain, holding a few meetings with figures of interest while in the country. His allies say he follows UK politics closely, in a granular way that extends beyond the headlines.
While some in the Maga movement do see the UK as the ancient Greece to America’s Rome (as Harold Macmillan once put it), those around Vance suggest he looks at it a little differently. Instead, they say he is in the group of a lot of Americans who “just sense something and have an almost ancestral yearning for the UK”.
JD Vance, the US vice-president
JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Murray adds: “They’re not doing it just to cause trouble. They’re doing it out of deep love and respect for the United Kingdom and wanting the United Kingdom to remain the United Kingdom.”
“I’ve always had the same response to, ‘Why is he so mean about Europe; why does he seem to hate us Brits so much?” James Orr, the Cambridge professor who is a close friend of Vance, tells me, referencing Vance’s critique of free speech in this country and defence spending. “It’s the reverse. He’s critical of European leadership and the technocratic elite not because he hates Europe but precisely because he loves it.”
In Washington this week, congressmen and British MPs (on a trade delegation) gathered at a reception in the congressional library (some of the UK intake later visited the Maga hotspot Butterworth’s where Rule Britannia played). There, both a Republican and Democrat congressman took time to speak about the special relationship. Republican Bob Latta described himself as a Churchillian: “When you think about the relationship that our nations have had with each other for well over 200 years, it’s incredible. It’s been a very tight relationship.” Democrat Jason Crow, a former army major in Iraq and Afghanistan, spoke of his gratitude for the two sides joining forces on defence. “You were there in a very real way when America needed you and that’s something I’ll never forget.”
Starmer’s own relationship with Trump and the wider administration has come as a pleasant surprise to many of his team. There had been a Maga backlash on Labour aides campaigning as volunteers for the Democrats. So far Downing Street feels its approach to play nice and flatter has paid off: it points to the first trade deal.
“Keir genuinely likes Trump,” says a No 10 figure of the dynamic. “He will say, ‘Trump is smart, he knows exactly what he wants and exactly how to do it’. They are an odd couple, but I really think that no one else except Keir has taken as much time to take Trump seriously.” Of course, Tony Blair and George Bush also made a rather unlikely pair, but formed a close alliance all the same.
But for all the likely smiles at Turnberry on Monday, the meeting may come with awkward moments as Starmer tries to focus on trade and cutting steel tariffs.
“The administration is worried about the UK seeking closer economic ties with China and not having Israel’s back,” warns one recent visitor to Washington. Labour MPs calling for Palestinian statehood also risks bad timing for Starmer’s visit: “That would be seen as the Islamists taking over,” says one insider. Members of the administration have also expressed concern about the UK’s economic position.
Not all Scots were happy to welcome Trump
RUSSELL CHEYNE/REUTERS
With Trump’s anglophilia mixed with the Maga weakness of using Britain as a case study of how not to handle immigration, there is still plenty of potential for mishap. As one recent visitor to Magaland in DC puts it: “You would have thought our country was run by a cover-up of paedophiles and Muslim rape gangs. That was what I walked into.”
For Starmer, the easier wins may be honorary. There’s the golf open returning to Turnberry. One Maga figure suggests that Starmer would be wise to give Trump a title. After all, in 2023 President Macron was given the Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath.
The new special relationship may run on golf, ancestral yearning and Churchillian nostalgia. But like everything with Trump, it will come at a price.