Like countless immigrants across the centuries, young Mary Macleod left her Western Isles home for a new life in New York in 1929 to escape grinding poverty. The young Scot was no different to the Irish families who fled, east or west, from the potato famine that blighted their homeland in the 1850s. She was spurred on by the very same ambitions that drive young Africans today to risk their lives in small boats across the English Channel – to build a better life than the one her ancestors had created for her.
But as she boarded tea S.S. Transylvania in Glasgow, she could not have dreamt that one day her son would be elected to the most powerful position in the world, not once, but twice.
On Tuesday, Mary’s fourth child, Donald John Trump, made history when he became only the second US president to return to power after losing an election. And he may prove to be the most consequential American president since Franklin D Roosevelt, but for all the wrong reasons. It is easy to mock Donald Trump with his product-laden combover, his too shiny teeth and impossible tan.
He looks and sounds like a cartoon oligarch, making up stories about immigrants eating family pets, while ignoring the fact that his mother, paternal grandfather and wife were all migrants. A B-movie autocrat who is in awe of eccentric billionaires like Elon Musk. A world leader whose authoritarian instincts risk destroying the promise of America, and inflaming conflict across the globe.
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