Why the Scots love Trump They are tired of progressive poseurs

According to her obituaries this week, one of the things for which the late Glaswegian comedian Janey Godley was best loved for was holding a sign saying “Trump is a cunt” while standing outside the then presidential candidate’s Turnberry golf course in Ayrshire. Yesterday, by way of tribute, The Guardian marshalled a series of outraged vox pops from dog walkers on Turnberry beach, primly noting that the only person they found who was pleased Trump won had “relatives in the United States”.

Indeed, such is the Caledonian reputation for hating the man that it seems some pro-Harris Americans are now investigating Scottish citizenship in the wake of his triumph. On Wednesday The National reported that Google had seen a surge in US-based web searches for “how to move to Scotland”, presumably emanating from disgruntled Democrat voters. Though no longer in government coalition himself, Green MSP Patrick Harvie was quoted as responding magisterially that “We believe in a Scotland that is open and welcome to all, a country that removes barriers rather than building walls… we are working to build a fairer, greener and more welcoming society that is the opposite of Trump’s destructive and hateful vision.”

In fact, though, conditions on the ground might not be as favourable as Harvie assumes. While Americans went to the polls, some fascinating alternative findings were simultaneously emerging from data collector Norstat. These indicated that, contrary to the standard narrative, Trump’s approval ratings are higher in Scotland than anywhere else in Western Europe. A quarter of Scottish respondents wanted him to win over Harris, as compared with 16% in the UK as a whole, 15% in Germany, and 14% in France. When you consider that both of the latter have a surging Right-wing electoral presence — and that Scotland doesn’t, at least on paper — the substantial difference in numbers look even more intriguing. Equally, according to the polling company, Scotland had the second lowest preference for Harris of all the countries surveyed, standing at 56%.

Assuming this data extrapolates more generally, what might be afoot? A simple explanation of the difference with other countries is that some inhabitants of Scotland see Donald John Trump as one of their own. His 18th century ancestors were victims of the Highland Clearances. His mother was born into a crofting family on the Isle of Lewis and spoke Gaelic before she spoke English. Indeed, clever local Labour MP Torcuil Crichton wrote on Wednesday — ruefully referring to the two named halves of the Hebridean island of Trump’s ancestors — “Congratulations to another son of Lewis, though I’ve never wished more to have woken today in the Isle of Harris.”

The President-elect has played up his Scottish origins many times, perhaps preferring them to a less marketable story about paternal German ancestry. He has also heavily invested in Turnberry and a separate golf course he owns in Aberdeenshire, with another one on the way, to be named after his mother. Both facts must have induced at least grudging affection in some. For once you know about his background, the facial features of one of the most powerful men in the world can sometimes mistily resolve into those of a Highland factor or fisherman, while you marvel at the gestalt switch. And the relentless patter suddenly seems more familiar too. As Kevin Bridges once put it: “Everything Donald Trump has said, I have heard from a Glasgow taxi driver.”

But tartan jingoism and a bit of financial self-interest can’t be the only reasons some Scots apparently now view the mogul as the lesser of two evils. When Godley mounted her one-woman protest at Turnberry in 2016, it was a different time. The most the average person knew about Trump was that he had been in the original version of The Apprentice, was the world’s richest ginger minger, and was running for president, to general incredulity. Political aficionados with their fingers on the pulse also knew he advocated grabbing women by the pussy, locking up Hillary Clinton, “draining the swamp” and “building a wall”.

It was easy to feel honourably defensive on behalf of immigrants of the non-English sort — Scotland hardly had any. Meanwhile, back then Nicola Sturgeon could still say what a woman was, and the only time a Scottish politician ever took the knee was when celebrating a Celtic win. Intersectionality was probably something to do with town planning, though no one knew exactly what.

Unaware as most were about virtue-signalling excesses soon to come, it was easy to react to Trump’s existence with that most traditional of Scottish responses: mockery of the absurdly rich and entitled. Godley’s action at Turnberry was very much in this vein: an irreverent deflation of elite pomposity and hubris, enjoyably cathartic to witness. She was the underdog David facing off a ridiculous foreign Goliath. What could be more satisfying to watch than that? In the best possible sense, her gesture was a populist one, a fact not belied by the fact that she ended up espousing various woke causes soon afterwards.

Because let’s face it: soon afterwards, nearly everybody did. By 2018 — the same  year Greta Thunberg hit the scene, trans lassies suddenly became lassies, and the University of Glasgow started to decolonise its curriculum — Scottish anti-Trump protests had become both much larger and a lot more sanctimonious. Those attending them were quoted rhapsodising about the “inclusive atmosphere”, a dead giveaway they were moving with the times. Greenpeace mounted a paragliding protest at Turnberry. Owen Jones, never knowingly understated, fronted a short film about the Scottish protests to plead for Guardian subscriptions so that his employer could fight “a man who represents bigotry, hatred, misogyny, and racism, who threatens the environment and who threatens international peace”.

Two years later George Floyd died in Minneapolis, and University of Edinburgh bosses responded by taking 18th century philosopher David Hume’s name off a building for being “racist”. It was probably around this time prescient Scots began to suspect that not all anti-Trumpians were on the same side.

Fast-forward to 2024, and a substantially larger part of the Scottish population have now had their fill of vacuous posturing from politicians, academics, and activist journalists. They are tired of superficially rousing soundbites and high-minded policies about gender, race, lockdowns, farming, fishing, and oil, running directly contrary to the interests of many working-class and lower middle-class voters. It is small wonder some Scots seem to have taken Harris’s verbal porridge with a hefty pinch of salt. It all feels so familiar, somehow.

And given this painful experience, it is conceivable that perspectives on Trump have also changed, at least a bit. Barely glimpsed in 2016, a rival Goliath to Trump has fully emerged into the light: a po-faced modern religion with a west coast American accent, even lighter on laughs than Calvinism, with influence in nearly every Scottish public institution and most especially at the top. Its impenetrable dogma is faithfully mouthed by nearly all those in positions of power, while criticism from outside the members-only club is dismissed as bigoted or thick. And Trump despises and laughs at it all.

Meanwhile, adding to a sense of enraging disconnect, some of the most vocal Scots-adjacent Trump denouncers and Kamala stans recently are obviously drawn from tribes and clans historically more likely to Clear rather than be Cleared: Rory Stewart of Eton and Balliol, for instance, whose family hails from Broich House in Crieff; or Alex Cole-Hamilton himself, descended from Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Faced with the lofty moralising of genetic patricians socially insulated from their own mistakes, discerning the true anti-Establishment Scottish reaction to Trump no longer seems quite so easy.

In the end, the average Scots position on Trump will partly come down to how what direct contact they have had with the hypocrisy and vested interests of progressive poseurs in the last decade, and whether they have suffered because of it. Equally, others won’t have updated their 2016-based priors. As historian Dominic Sandbrook pointed out to Stewart during a much circulated clip, most people are not on X/Twitter, don’t read newspaper op-eds, and have no interest in the political preoccupations of commentators either on Right or Left.

This of course includes Scottish people. To a lot of them, Trump probably still looks as ludicrous and unreliable as he did before: a rambling, self-important buffoon, vaguely reminiscent of that uncle who can’t help showing off at family gatherings and making lewd remarks to his nieces. To others, though, he now looks like he is standing outside the members-only club with them, laughing at the daft cunts inside.

---

Kathleen Stock is an UnHerd columnist and a co-director of The Lesbian Project.

Docstockk