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New York Times
31-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
A Short History of Awkward Gift Giving Between U.S. and U.K. Leaders
When President Trump visited Scotland this week, the first official gift he received was a 1921 census record from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, with details of his Scottish-born mother, Mary Anne, then 9 years old. Scotland's first minister, John Swinney, also presented a document dating from 1853 that registered the marriage of Mr. Trump's maternal great-grandparents. And there was a third gift, too: a historical map of Lewis. In exchange, Mr. Trump gave Mr. Swinney something rather less personal: an American bald-eagle figurine. But some other diplomatic gifts in recent years have shown a greater disparity of approach. Here's a selection of noteworthy offerings exchanged when American and British leaders have met — and a couple of examples from elsewhere in Europe, too. 1. The underwhelming gift The most unequal exchange may have taken place in 2009, when the British prime minister was Gordon Brown. Visiting President Barack Obama in the White House, Mr. Brown presented a pen holder carved from the timbers of the Royal Navy sloop Gannet, an antislavery ship and sister vessel of the Resolute, from which the Oval Office desk was made. He also gave a first edition of a seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill. Mr. Brown got a set of DVDs. 2. The ancestral gift Mr. Swinney was hardly the first politician to look to a president's ancestry to find that elusive present with a personal touch. When Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany flew to the White House in June, he took a framed version of the birth record of the president's paternal grandfather, Friedrich, who was born in Germany in 1869. That side of the Trump family originated in the small winemaking town of Kallstadt, which Mr. Trump's grandfather left for the United States in 1885 — although the president speaks less about his German than Scottish heritage. This form of flattery isn't only reserved for the current president. The British prime minister in 2023, Rishi Sunak, tried something similar for President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Biden takes pride in his Irish heritage, but he also has a British great-great-grandfather, Christopher Biden. Mr. Sunak presented a book by him. It may not have been a page turner. The title is 'Naval Discipline: Subordination Contrasted With Insubordination,' and it's a 19th-century treatise about preventing mutinies at sea. Mr. Sunak's Irish counterpart, Simon Harris, perhaps found things easier. In 2024 he gave Mr. Biden silver cuff links decorated with Irish harps, a Gaelic football jersey and a letter written by President John F. Kennedy in 1963 after a visit to Ireland. 3. The Churchill-themed gift Several leaders have used gifts to remind Mr. Trump of the bond between their countries. And for the British how better to do so than to invoke the memory of Churchill, an unwavering wartime ally whose mother was American-born? A decade after Mr. Brown's gift to Mr. Obama, in 2019, Theresa May, who was then the British prime minister, presented Mr. Trump with a framed draft of the Atlantic Charter, a joint statement by Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued on Aug. 14, 1941. Queen Elizabeth II followed a similar strategy when she gave Mr. Trump a first edition of a book about World War II written in 1959 by Churchill. On the same visit, also in 2019, Queen Elizabeth showed Mr. Trump around an exhibition of American artworks at Buckingham Palace. It included an item Mr. Trump had given her the previous July, which a royal official told British reporters the president had failed to recognize. Melania Trump, the official said, came to his rescue. 4. The short-lived gift Not all gestures work out as planned. In 2018, President Emmanuel Macron of France arrived at the White House bearing a symbol of lasting Franco-American friendship: an oak tree from a World War I battlefield. It was planted on the South Lawn but later died and had to be replaced. Gifts that don't put down roots are typically turned over to the State Department, but presidents can then purchase them for an appraised value. That often makes family documents or symbolic objects an attractive choice. British politicians, too, have limits on what they can accept without paying. 5. The gift that is actually quite useful Some objects may be more tempting to accept than others. After Mr. Brown's White House visit in 2009, the DVDs of classic movies he was given became a favorite topic in the British news media, which gleefully reported that he couldn't watch them because of regional playback restrictions. Mr. Obama may have tried harder with Mr. Brown's successor, David Cameron. At a meeting in 2012, the president offered up a handmade grill, engraved with American and British flags. Mr. Cameron's gift in return was a table-tennis table; they had played the game when Mr. Obama visited Britain the year before. In 2021, at a summit of leaders of the Group of 7 nations in Cornwall, England, Mr. Biden tried something similar, giving Boris Johnson — the British prime minister of the day, and a known cycling enthusiast — a hand-built bicycle.
Associated Press
29-07-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Trump caps his Scottish visit by opening a new golf course
BALMEDIE, Scotland (AP) — President Donald Trump is opening a new golf course bearing his name in Scotland on Tuesday, capping a five-day foreign trip designed around promoting his family's luxury properties and playing golf. Trump and his sons Eric and Donald Jr. are cutting the ceremonial ribbon and playing the first-ever round at the new Trump course in the village of Balmedie, on the northern coast of Scotland. Also from the country's north is the president's late mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, who was born on the Isle of Lewis, immigrated to New York and died in 2000 at age 88. 'My mother loved Scotland,' Trump said during a meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday at another one of his golf courses, Turnberry, on Scotland's southern coast. 'It's different when your mother was born here.' Trump used his trip to meet with Starmer and reach a trade framework for tariffs between the U.S. and the European Union's 27 member countries — though scores of key details remain to be hammered out. The overseas jaunt let Trump escape Washington's sweaty summer humidity but also the still-raging scandal over the files related to Jeffrey Epstein. But it was mostly built around golf — and walking the new course before it officially begins selling rounds to the public on Aug. 13, adding to a lengthy list of ways Trump has used the White House to promote his brand. Trump's assets are in a trust, and his sons are running the family business while he's in the White House. But any business generated at the course will ultimately enrich the president when he leaves office. The new golf course will be the third owned by the Trump Organization in Scotland. Trump bought Turnberry in 2014 and owns another course near Aberdeen that opened in 2012. Trump golfed on Saturday as protesters took to the streets, and on Sunday. He invited Starmer, who famously doesn't golf, aboard Air Force One so the prime minister could get a private tour of his Aberdeen property before Tuesday's ceremonial opening. 'Even if you play badly, it's still good,' Trump said of golfing on his course over the weekend. 'If you had a bad day on the golf course, it's OK. It's better than other days.' Trump even found time at Turnberry to praise its renovated ballroom, which he said he'd paid lavishly to upgrade — even suggesting that he might install one like it at the White House. 'I could take this one, drop it right down there,' Trump joked. 'And it would be beautiful.'
Washington Post
29-07-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Trump caps his Scottish visit by opening a new golf course
BALMEDIE, Scotland — President Donald Trump is opening a new golf course bearing his name in Scotland on Tuesday, capping a five-day foreign trip designed around promoting his family's luxury properties and playing golf. Trump and his sons Eric and Donald Jr. are cutting the ceremonial ribbon and playing the first-ever round at the new Trump course in the village of Balmedie, on the northern coast of Scotland. Also from the country's north is the president's late mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, who was born on the Isle of Lewis, immigrated to New York and died in 2000 at age 88.
Al Arabiya
29-07-2025
- Business
- Al Arabiya
Trump caps his Scottish visit by opening a new golf course
President Donald Trump is opening a new golf course bearing his name in Scotland on Tuesday, capping a five-day foreign trip designed around promoting his family's luxury properties and playing golf. Trump and his sons Eric and Donald Jr. are cutting the ceremonial ribbon and playing the first-ever round at the new Trump course in the village of Balmedie on the northern coast of Scotland. Also from the country's north is the president's late mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, who was born on the Isle of Lewis, immigrated to New York, and died in 2000 at age 88. 'My mother loved Scotland,' Trump said during a meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday at another one of his golf courses, Turnberry, on Scotland's southern coast. 'It's different when your mother was born here.' Trump used his trip to meet with Starmer and reach a trade framework for tariffs between the US and the European Union's 27 member countries – though scores of key details remain to be hammered out. The overseas jaunt let Trump escape Washington's sweaty summer humidity but also the still-raging scandal over the files related to Jeffrey Epstein. But it was mostly built around golf – and walking the new course before it officially begins selling rounds to the public on Aug. 13, adding to a lengthy list of ways Trump has used the White House to promote his brand. Trump's assets are in a trust, and his sons are running the family business while he's in the White House. But any business generated at the course will ultimately enrich the president when he leaves office. The new golf course will be the third owned by the Trump Organization in Scotland. Trump bought Turnberry in 2014 and owns another course near Aberdeen that opened in 2012. Trump golfed on Saturday as protesters took to the streets and on Sunday. He invited Starmer, who famously doesn't golf, aboard Air Force One so the prime minister could get a private tour of his Aberdeen property before Tuesday's ceremonial opening. 'Even if you play badly it's still good,' Trump said of golfing on his course over the weekend. 'If you had a bad day on the golf course it's OK. It's better than other days.' Trump even found time at Turnberry to praise its renovated ballroom, which he said he'd paid lavishly to upgrade – even suggesting that he might install one like it at the White House. 'I could take this one drop it right down there,' Trump joked. 'And it would be beautiful.'
CTV News
24-07-2025
- Politics
- CTV News
Trump's trip to Scotland highlights his complex relationship with his mother's homeland
TURNBERRY, Scotland — U.S. President Donald Trump's trip to Scotland this week will be a homecoming of sorts, but he's likely to get a mixed reception. Trump has had a long and at times rocky relationship with the country where his mother grew up in a humble house on a windswept isle. He will be met by both political leaders and protesters during the visit, which begins Friday and takes in his two Scottish golf resorts. It comes two months before King Charles III is due to welcome him on a formal state visit to the U.K. 'I'm not proud that he (has) Scottish heritage,' said Patricia Sloan, who lives near the Trump Turnberry course on Scotland's west coast. 'All countries have good and bad that come out of them, and if he's going to kind of wave the flag of having Scottish heritage, that's the bad part, I think.' A daughter of Scotland Trump's mother was born Mary Anne MacLeod in 1912 near the town of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, one of the Outer Hebrides off Scotland's northwest coast. 'My mother was born in Scotland — Stornoway, which is serious Scotland,' Trump said in 2017. She was raised in a large Scots Gaelic-speaking family and left for New York in 1930, one of thousands of people from the islands to emigrate in the hardscrabble years after World War I. MacLeod married the president's father, Fred C. Trump, the son of German immigrants, in New York in 1936. She died in August 2000 at the age of 88. Trump still has relatives on Lewis, and visited in 2008, spending a few minutes in the plain gray house where his mother grew up. A long golf course battle Trump's ties and troubles in Scotland are intertwined with golf. He first proposed building a course on a wild and beautiful stretch of the North Sea coast north of Aberdeen in 2006. The Trump International Scotland development was backed by the Scottish government. But it was fiercely opposed by some local residents and conservationists, who said the stretch of coastal sand dunes was home to some of the country's rarest wildlife, including skylarks, kittiwakes, badgers and otters. Local fisherman Michael Forbes became an international cause celebre after he refused the Trump Organization's offer of 350,000 pounds (US$690,000 at the time) to sell his family's rundown farm in the center of the estate. Forbes still lives on his property, which Trump once called 'a slum and a pigsty.' 'If it weren't for my mother, would I have walked away from this site? I think probably I would have, yes,' Trump said in 2008 amid the planning battle over the course. 'Possibly, had my mother not been born in Scotland, I probably wouldn't have started it.' The golf course was eventually approved and opened in 2012. Some of the grander aspects of the planned development, including 500 houses and a 450-room hotel, have not been realized, and the course has never made a profit. A second 18-hole course at the resort is scheduled to open this summer. It's named the MacLeod Course in honor of Trump's mother. There has been less controversy about Trump's other Scottish golf site, the long-established Turnberry resort in southwest Scotland, which he bought in 2014. 'He did bring employment to the area,' said Louise Robertson, who lives near Turnberry. 'I know that in terms of the hotel and the lighthouse, he spent a lot of money restoring it, so again, that was welcomed by the local people. But other than that, I can't really say positive things about it.' Trump has pushed for the British Open to be held at the course for the first time since 2009. Turnberry is one of 10 courses on the rotation to host the Open. But organizers say there are logistical issues about 'road, rail and accommodation infrastructure' that must be resolved before it can return. Protests and politicians Trump has had a rollercoaster relationship with Scottish and U.K. politicians. More than a decade ago, the Scottish government enlisted Trump as an unpaid business adviser with the GlobalScot network, a group of business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives with a connection to Scotland. It dumped him in 2015 after he called for Muslims to be banned from the U.S. The remarks also prompted Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen to revoke an honorary doctorate in business administration it had awarded Trump in 2010. This week Trump will meet left-leaning Scottish First Minister John Swinney, an erstwhile Trump critic who endorsed Kamala Harris before last year's election — a move branded an 'insult' by a spokesperson for Trump's Scottish businesses. Swinney said it's 'in Scotland's interest' for him to meet the president. Some Scots disagree, and a major police operation is being mounted during the visit in anticipation of protests. The Stop Trump Scotland group has encouraged demonstrators to come to Aberdeen and 'show Trump exactly what we think of him in Scotland.' U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is also expected to travel to Scotland for talks with Trump. The British leader has forged a warm relationship with Trump, who said this month 'I really like the prime minister a lot, even though he's a liberal.' They are likely to talk trade, as Starmer seeks to nail down an exemption for U.K. steel from Trump's tariffs. There is no word on whether Trump and Starmer — not a golfer — will play a round at one of the courses. ___ Jill Lawless And Kwiyeon Ha, The Associated Press Lawless reported from London
