Mother Trump may indeed have wept seeing Donald with the Queen... no doubt with embarrassment
THE jury may still be out in England about the success – or otherwise – of Donald Trump’s visit, but the Commander in Chief has made no secret of the highlight of his three-day English sojourn.
As he told Piers Morgan in an interview aboard Air Force One, the standout moment was unquestionably his visit to Windsor Castle for tea with the Queen and to inspect the guard of honour.
According to Morgan, Trump sighed at the recollection of the historic meeting. ‘I was walking up and I was saying [to Melania], “Can you imagine my mother seeing this scene? Windsor. Windsor Castle”… I was thinking about my mother.
‘My mother passed away a while ago and she was a tremendous fan of the Queen. She thought she was a woman of elegance, and my mother felt she was a great woman. I remember even as a little guy, if there was any kind of a ceremony to do with the Queen, my mother would be watching the television – she wanted to see it.’
Flatter
True to form, Trump didn’t hesitate to flatter the Queen with an account of his late mother’s loyalty. He said: ‘You know, my mother was your big fan. She was born in Stornaway in the Hebrides. And that’s very serious Scotland, as you know, there’s no doubt about that.’
There’s also no doubt that, as a young girl growing up in grinding poverty, the future Mary Trump would never have dreamed that her offspring would scale the dizzy heights of society to the degree that her son has. Whether she was pleased at how he conducted himself during his rise to the top, is a different matter entirely.
In fact, it’s highly likely that, just as she found his behaviour mortifying during his dramatic divorce from his first wife Ivana Trump, she would have squirmed in embarrassment at his unregal and boorish antics in Windsor. And that the tear or two of pride that Trump sentimentally imagined her shedding at his meeting with the Queen would, had she been alive to witness it, swiftly turned to a shudder of despair.
Compared to the driven and domineering figure of Trump’s father Fred, who pushed his son remorselessly to succeed, Mary Trump is a more shadowy character in the riches-to-even-greater-riches story of Donald Trump.
Trump’s childhood friends say that although she was always cordial, she kept her distance from them, unlike Fred who would be eager to know how everybody’s day went. Described in turns as ‘tight‘bunch lipped and conservative’ as well as ‘polished, proper and unassuming’, Mary’s airs and graces impressed her old neighbours during her annual visits home to Scotland.
The word ‘humble’ doesn’t do justice to her childhood existence. The youngest of ten children, Mary Anne MacLeod grew up in a village on the remote Isle of Lewis in the outer Hebrides, squashed into a rented two-bedroom cottage. Her father was a fisherman and the family spoke Gaelic, with the children picking up some English at school.
World War I robbed the area of a generation of young men and, with no opportunities to speak of, Mary Anne followed her three elder sisters to America when she was 17 to work as a domestic.
Things looked up when she married Fred Trump, a small-time builder at the age of 24.
As Fred’s business grew and children arrived, Mary played the role of a wellheeled suburban housewife with enough resources to have a housekeeper and hold formal family suppers every night.
Royalist
The post-war building boom in the States caused the family fortune to swell further with Mary rising to her new station in life, becoming an established philanthropic figure in New York, attending ladies’ lunches, volunteering on charitable boards and always whisked between engagements in her chauffeur-driven Rolls with its personalised licence plates bearing her initials, MMT.
But in all the narratives of her life, the constant thread is her strong Presbyterian faith as well as her royalist streak and the reverence she held for the British royals.
She revelled in the Queen’s coronation in 1953, remaining glued to the pageantry, despite the fact that, as Donald Trump recalled in his book The Art Of The Deal, his father mocked the British royals as a of con artists’. Given the latter’s low opinion of the monarchy, it’s probable that he would have approved of his son’s casual manners in Windsor, but Mary Trump’s love of pomp and circumstance means that she would most likely have been appalled.
According to some reports, he arrived 15 minutes late, something that would be a massive discourtesy to anyone, never mind a nation’s figurehead, a head of state – or indeed a 92-year-old woman standing in the blistering heat.
Protocol
Trump was perfectly right not to bow and scrape before the Queen and to shake her hand as an equal, but his oblivious attitude to palace protocol was terrible.
When he was inspecting the military parade, he marched on ahead of his host. When the Queen, in the manner of a patient dog owner attempting to bring a lively pup to heel, tried to point out where he should stand, he clumsily turned his back – a cardinal sin in royal circles – and almost crashed into her.
Poor Mary was probably turning in her grave at this point. It’s not the first time Mary would have felt less than proud of her son, who she only lived to see become a bombastic boardroom celebrity.
In 1990 when his ugly divorce from Ivana was being played out in the media and he was philandering with the model Marla Maples, as well as floundering in debts of hundreds of millions of dollars, Mary, then nearing 80 was aghast at being dragged into the tawdry soap opera.
According to Vanity Fair, she was so mortified that she asked her soon-to-be ex-daughter-in-law, ‘What kind of son have I created?’
There are plenty of people today who could leave Mary in no doubt as to the answer to that question. During his presidential campaign some members of his extended family in Scotland tried to distance themselves from him.
‘I used to laugh about being related to Donald Trump,’ said a cousin. ‘Now I hardly dare mention him… He’s a rabble raiser. He’s outrageous. You quail at the thought of what he’s capable of.’
What would his mother make of her famous son now? ‘I think his mother would be horrified,’ replied his relative.
The Donald’s assault on business and political power may be testament to the American dream’s ability to catapult families from hardship to extraordinary wealth and privilege within a single generation.
Mary Trump came from rags to riches, but she might agree that, as far as the United States’ most vulnerable citizens and neighbours are concerned, her son’s rise to the top is a tragedy and, for her, personally, an embarrassment.