Will ye no come back? Trump’s homeland hopes for a return visit

It is a world away from the bright lights of Washington and the gaudy opulence of Trump Tower in New York.

US president-elect Donald Trump outside a house in Tong, in June 2008, on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland where his mother was brought up before emigrating to the US. Picture: AP

It is a world away from the bright lights of Washington and the gaudy opulence of Trump Tower.

However, a pebbledashed cottage on the Western Isles is poised to became a place of pilgrimage for devotees of America’s next commander-in-chief.

The modest two-storey property in the Hebridean hamlet of Tong, on Lewis, is where the president-elect traces his roots from.

It was home to his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, who spoke almost exclusively in Gaelic before she left for New York at the age of 18. There, beneath an alien skyline of neon and steel, she met a dashing property magnate by the name of Frederick Trump.

Images of their son’s rugged ­ancestral homeland were beamed into millions of American homes before the election. It has provoked unprecedented interest in the crofting community, which has no pub or post office and whose hardy population numbers about 500.

Surging waves have drawn surfers to the scattered coastal community 7km north of Stornoway, which also hosts the annual Lewis Highland Games and the Western Isles strongest man competition.

Derick Mackenzie, a Lewis resident and a fan of Mr Trump, predicted that the area would benefit from a significant surge in overseas visitors. “I think we will see a boost to tourism from his win. A lot of ­people will want to see where he came from. At the end of the day, people like a winner. It’s human nature. I hope he will come here again,” he said.

Bill Lawson, a Western Isles-based genealogist, said he had ­already been inundated by ­requests from the US for Mr Trump’s family tree.

Mr Trump has made two fleeting visits to his family’s home, which is surrounded by a treeless and marshy landscape. The first was a long-forgotten childhood holiday, while the second, in 2008, was a three-hour stopover en route to Aberdeen, where he unveiled plans to create the “greatest golf course in the world”.

After emerging from his private jet and presenting copies of his bestseller How to Get Rich to ­bemused locals he addressed journalists outside the family seat, stating: “I think this land is special.”

Mr Trump has often lavished praise on his mother, who died in 2000.

He wrote in his autobiography: “Looking back, I realise now that I got some of my sense of showmanship from my mother.

“She always had a flair for the dramatic and the grand.

“She was a very traditional housewife, but she also had a sense of the world beyond her.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Mr Trump’s first cousin, Calum ­Murray, is not particularly ­enthused by the prospect of a presidential visit.

“I don’t know if it would be possible for him to come back. It was different then,” Mr Murray said. “The island couldn’t cope with it now.”

Another cousin, Alasdair Murray, who lives in the family home, added: “Of course everyone here is happy for him. We are just waiting for it to sink in a bit.”

The Times