Trump’s trip to Scotland highlights his complex relationship with his mother’s homeland

Police patrol near the Trump Turnberry golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, Wednesday, July 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

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.

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Jill Lawless And Kwiyeon Ha, The Associated Press

Lawless reported from London