MIKEY SMITH: I followed Donald Trump around Scotland - and one thing was oddly missing

Daily Mirror

28-07-2025

There was plenty of golf being played during his visit to the White House's Scottish branch office. But there was something - or someone - curiously conspicuous by their absence
I've spent quite a lot of time looking at Donald Trump over a hedge this week - and one thing was curiously missing.
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There was plenty of golf being played during his visit to the White House's Scottish branch office.
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Some beautiful scenery. Some late-night Truth Social posts.
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But the faint smell of cigarette smoke and sound of raspy, Kentish laughter was absent.
It's hard to say whether Nigel Farage's no-show at Turnberry this weekend was a snub by Trump to a man who's been slowly edging out of his orbit in the last few months.
Alternatively, it could have been a calculated move by Farage because the US President's Epstein difficulties are - even by Nigel's standards - making him too toxic.
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If it's the latter, Trump will have done himself no favours today - but more of that later.
Standing in front of a live TV camera with Donald Trump is always a risky move.
So whatever possessed Keir Starmer to agree to do it twice in a day is quite beyond me.
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That said - other than a handful of awkward moments in what seemed like hours of on-camera questioning - Starmer seems to have emerged from his visit to Trumpworld, South Ayrshire, largely unscathed.
Aside from the incredibly loud bagpipes drowning most of it out, his arrival at Turnberry could hardly have gone better.
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Trump praised the PM to the high heavens. And his wife. And his immigration policies.
Trump offered to discuss scrapping tariffs on Scotch Whisky - even suggesting he could break a lifetime of sobriety by trying some for himself.
There were some slightly awkward expressions when the President complained - again - that nobody had said thankyou for the aid the US had sent to Gaza.
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But Starmer seems to have convinced him to take our side rather than Benjamin Netanyahu's. "You have to get the kids fed," before moving on to "phase two" in Gaza.
Phase two presumably meaning the conversion of Gaza into the Vegas of the Middle East, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
The sticky moments were very few.
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Trump branded Sadiq Khan a "nasty person" - probably giving an instant boost to his approval numbers in London, where Trump fans are few and far between.
Nevertheless, it prompted Starmer, doing his best Hugh Grant, to lean towards the Donald, touch his arm and declare Sadiq a "friend".
Nigel Farage only got the briefest of mentions - Trump called him a friend and said he was doing "very well."
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And then, after a weekend of (mostly) managing to avoid the E-word, it only took a couple of questions from the admitted media to set Trump off.
"It's a hoax," he insisted of the files - suggesting that if anything in them makes him look bad, then it's "phony" and has been planted there by his enemies.
But in the middle of all this there was a sliver of actual new information - potentially quite a significant one for people following this story.
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Trump claimed the reason he fell out with Epstein in the early 00s was because the notorious paedophile kept stealing his staff and he'd had enough of it.
It may be entirely unrelated, but Epstein's most well-known victim, Virginia Giuffre, then 16, was working for Donald Trump at Mar A Lago in 2000 when she was recruited by Maxwell to be a 'masseuse' for Epstein.
All that was left after the two rounds of grilling and a brief closed-doors meeting was to head to Prestwick airport and hop on Air Force One.
Because not only is Starmer having a two-Trump press conference day, he's having a two-Trump golf courses day.
The trip to Aberdeenshire will be his first aboard Trump's airborne White House. Hopefully he'll bring us back some of the infamous AF1 branded M&Ms.