Donald Trump’s Roots in Scotland

0:00Today on State of the World, Donald Trump's roots in Scotland.

0:08You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. It's Monday, September 15th. I'm Greg Dixon. This week, President Trump travels to the United Kingdom for a state visit with King Charles at Windsor Castle. The visit will renew the ties between the U.S. and U.K. And Trump has personal ties to the U.K. as well. His late mother was an immigrant to the United States from one of the northernmost islands in Scotland. On today's episode, NPR's Lauren Frayer takes us to the place where Marianne McLeod Trump was born and raised.

0:51Some 40 miles off the west coast of Scotland, the islands of the Hebrides lie out in the Atlantic. Old newsreels describe the wild beauty of the Outer Hebrides and the locals as hardscrabble fisher folk. The Duke drives Her Majesty from the jetty where fisher girls turn out to greet them. Poor huddled masses waving at the Queen's Royal Yacht when it docked here in the 1950s. Even today with modern air travel. The pilot of my flight got on the PA system to warn of a nasty har, Scottish sea fog. We had to circle the Isle of Lewis several times and ended up being the only flight able to land that day.

1:32This is a place more accustomed to people leaving rather than arriving. And the local Gaelic songs, which echo through a local castle-turned-museum, are all about homesickness and loss. Less than 24 hours. Curator Shonich McDonald shows me old black and white photos of crowds waving handkerchiefs as ships set sail for America. This says, yeah. The mothers were crying, we're never going to see you again. Because the people who left were very poor. They might be there for decades before they could come back home to visit, by which time their parents would have died by then. She chokes up. Everyone here has someone who went across the ocean forever.

2:18I would say a large proportion of people here have an empathy for those that have to flee their homelands, whether it's oppression, poverty. And so it's this place known for its empathy for immigrants, where President Trump's mother, Mary Ann McLeod, was born in 1912, the youngest of the local postmaster's 10 children. All ten would join a chain of migration, learning English as a second language, and leaving this island, where their roots go back centuries. The wind sort of whips over these sand dunes and hills, just up from the village where Marianne MacLeod was born and raised, and this is the local cemetery.

3:03Here's Kenneth MacLeod and his daughter Mary, 1838. They're actually all MacLeods here. It was a McLeod, you were a McLeod, twice. But it's a very big clan. There are in fact so many McLeods on the Isle of Lewis that it feels like everyone is related to the U.S. president. You could be, we all could be. That's Anna Tucker, a volunteer at the local historical society. Her maiden name was McLeod, so was her mother's, and both of her grandfathers were named Angus McLeod. High school, the very first day, and we would put in alphabetical order and you would have A to L and M's because people would have the same name.

3:49You'd have Donald McLeod A, Donald McLeod B, Donald McLeod C. One of Trump's cousins still lives in the house where the president's mother grew up. It's a sort of squat, grey, stucco bungalow. There's an old black and white photo of Mary Ann as a teenager sort of resting on this windowsill. I'm walking around the side of the house. This annex must have been where her father ran the post office. And across the street and down the hill, I can see the wild North Atlantic. As a child, Trump visited his grandparents in this house. He came back briefly in 2008 and spoke to reporters. It's nice to be here.

4:30My mother never lost her feeling for Scotland. She loves Scotland. But there is no plaque or sign. At the local pub, every time Trump pops up on TV, neighbors reprise their stories about his mom using her Gaelic name. Mariana Niclauch. Mariana Niclauch. Mary Ann MacLeod. And that's how most people would say it? Yes, yes, yes. That's how she would have introduced her? Absolutely, absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. Say it again, Mariana Niclauch. Mariana Niclauch. Callum Angus Mackay made a Gaelic TV documentary about Mary Ann McLeod based on letters she sent to a lifelong pen pal in Dundee on the mainland.

5:10Mackay says public opinion in town is divided on Trump himself. Signs in one shop window say, shame on you, Donald John. But he says locals are proud of Trump's mother's trajectory. It is primarily a rags to riches. Mary Ann basically left with a plastic bag under her arm. Very little money. Just like everyone else. McLeod followed her older sister to New York in the late 1920s. She may have first worked as a maid or a nanny, Mackay says. When the U.S. stock market crashed in 1929, she came home to Scotland for a bit. But by then, she had met a real estate developer named Fred Trump, who convinced her in letters to come back and marry him.

5:55And from then on, the photos she sent home showed a woman transformed. Her hair is now dyed blonde, and she looks as if she has walked out of the pages of The Great Gatsby, or a Hollywood movie. Torkil Crichton collaborated with Mackay on that Gallic documentary, and is now a centre-left politician with the ruling Labour Party, representing this cluster of islands in Parliament. It's the smallest constituency in the United Kingdom. Crichton's own mother grew up down the road from Trump's. And last winter, he sent a Christmas card to the White House. From one politician to another, across the aisle, from the old world to the new.

6:35Inviting Trump back, perhaps while he's in the UK this week. If he came home, he'd see his mother's story. And it's a hard work, actually, you know, and the determination that made America great. And it's still going on. It's coming from different parts of the world. But isn't that the story of America, how beautifully and fantastically it renews itself all the time? Trump's mother herself came home many times over the years, showering neighbors with gifts, sitting in the family pew at church, and switching back into her native Gaelic as if she'd never left. Crichton does not think her son will return, though.

7:11Because to acknowledge his mother's story of chain migration, which is the kind of, let's face it, the kind of woman he wants to stop coming into America right now. I think to acknowledge that would be to kind of go against lots of his own policies and beliefs. Marianne McLeod died in the summer of 2000, aged 88, without seeing her son reach the White House. But at Trump's first inauguration in 2017, he did swear the oath of office on a Bible from this island given to him by his mother. Lauren Fryer, NPR News, on the Windy Isle of Lewis in Scotland.

7:55That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.