Trump to fly to Scotland to visit mother's homeland amid protests
Isle of Lewis, UK - Donald Trump will fly into Scotland on Friday for a private visit to the land where his mother was born and spent her childhood on the remote Isle of Lewis.
"It's great to be home, this was the home of my mother," he said when he arrived on his last visit in 2023.
Born Mary Anne MacLeod, Trump's mom emigrated to the US when she was 18. She then met and married Fred Trump, kickstarting the family's meteoric rise that has led their son, Donald, all the way to the White House.
During his visit, the current president, who is six months into his second term, plans to officially open his latest golf course in northeastern Aberdeen – making him the owner of three such links in Scotland.
Although Donald Trump has talked openly about his father Fred – a millionaire and property developer whose own father emigrated from Germany – he remains more discreet about his mother, who died in 2000 at the age of 88.
She was born in 1912 on Lewis, the largest island in the Outer Hebrides in northwest Scotland, and grew up in the small town of Tong.
Trump visited the humble family home in 2008, pausing for a photo in front of the two-story house. He has cousins who still live in the house, which has been modernized since Mary Anne MacLeod's time but remains modest, standing just around 650 feet from the sea.
Its slate roof and gray walls are a world away from Trump's luxury Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, or his gold-adorned apartment in Trump Tower, New York.
According to the British press, which based its reports on local documents, Trump's grandfather was a fisherman.
MacLeod was the 10th and last child of the family, and her first language was Gaelic before she learned English at school.
Life was tough on Lewis after World War I, which claimed the lives of many of the island's young men. Following in the footsteps of her older sister, and so many other Scots over the decades, she decided to emigrate to the US.
MacLeod boarded the SS Transylvania from Glasgow in 1930, bound for New York.
Trump describes his mother as "a great beauty"
On her immigration papers, MacLeod wrote she was a "domestic" when asked about her profession. One of Trump's sisters recalled that MacLeod had worked as a nanny in a wealthy family.
But a few years later her life turned around when she reportedly met Fred Trump at an evening dance. They were married in 1936 in Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side, and MacLeod became a US citizen in 1942.
As Fred Trump built and expanded his property empire in the city by constructing middle-class homes in districts such as Queens and Brooklyn, Mary Anne devoted herself to charitable works.
"Even in old age, rich and respected and with her hair arranged in a dynamic orange swirl, she would drive a rose-coloured Rolls-Royce to collect coins from laundry machines in apartment blocks that belonged to the Trumps," the Times wrote this month.
Photos of her hobnobbing with New York high society show her with her blonde hair swept up in a bun, reminiscent of her son's distinctive side-swept coiffure.
She was "a great beauty," Donald Trump has gushed in one of his rare comments about his mother, adding she was also "one of the most honest and charitable people I have ever known."
And on X, he has pointed to "great advice from my mother: 'Trust in God and be true to yourself.'"
Protests against Trump's visit planned in Scotland
In 2018 then-British prime minister Theresa May presented Trump with his family tree tracing his Scottish ancestors.
Less than 20,000 people live on Lewis, and MacLeod is a common surname.
Residents tell how Mary Anne MacLeod regularly returned to her roots until her death, while one of the president's sisters won over the locals by making a large donation to a retirement home.
But Donald Trump has not impressed everyone in Scotland, and protests against his visit are planned on Saturday in Aberdeen and Edinburgh.
Earlier this year in April, a banner fluttered from a shop in the port of Stornoway, the island's largest town. "Shame on you Donald John," it proclaimed.
Local authorities have asked for the banner to be taken down, but it is due to tour the island this summer with residents invited to sign it.
Cover photo: ANDY BUCHANAN / AFP