Mary Anne MacLeod Trump

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Mary Anne MacLeod Trump (born May 10, 1912 in Tong near Stornoway on Lewis and Harris , Scotland , † August 7, 2000 in New Hyde Park , New York ) was the mother of Donald Trump , the 45th President of the United States . Her origins became a political issue in 2016 after her son Donald claimed in the run-up to the presidential election that low-wage immigrants would depress wages in the US and increase unemployment.

Life

Mary Anne MacLeod ( Scottish Gaelic Mairi Anna NicLeòid ) grew up poor in the small fishing village of Tong on the coast of the Scottish Hebrides -Insel Lewis and Harris on. She was the youngest of Malcolm and Mary MacLeod's ten children. Her father (1866–1954) was a fisherman and small farmer ( crofter ). Her mother tongue was Scottish Gaelic ; She only learned English at school. According to her own statement, she left school at the age of 14; Nothing is known about vocational training.

At the age of 17, she emigrated to New York in 1930 , where she arrived on board the British ocean liner RMS Transylvania the day after her 18th birthday . There she lived with her sister Catherine Reid, who had previously emigrated, on Long Island and worked as a maid . Catherine had already emigrated in 1921 after the birth of an illegitimate daughter had caused a scandal in the strictly religious village of Tong ( Free Presbyterian Church ) and had married a butler from Scotland . Two other sisters also lived in the USA. When Mary Anne set out on the trip, the Stornoway Gazette noted an “exodus of young people” from the region.

In the early 1930s, Mary Anne MacLeod met the entrepreneur Fred C. Trump , and by 1935 at the latest, she was living with the Trumps in Queens, New York . In 1936 they were married in a small group, including their sisters living in the United States and their husbands who, like themselves, were immigrants and worked as maids and servants. The couple had five children: Maryanne (* 1937), Frederick Jr. (1938–1981), Elizabeth (* 1942), Donald (* 1946) and Robert (1948–2020). The birth of the last son, who was 36 years old, had complications and the uterus had to be removed. After that she was seriously ill for a long time.

Mary Anne Trump has been described as charming, lively, and clever, and despite her simple origins, she was a worthy partner to accompany her increasingly successful husband on social occasions. Her naturalization in the USA did not take place until 1942 for unknown reasons. In later years, when her son Donald took over the father's business, she faded into the background.

In 1991, at the age of 79, she was ambushed near her home in Queens and seriously injured, causing her eyesight and hearing to be impaired. Her husband suffered from Alzheimer's disease in the last few years of his life . A year after his death, she died at the age of 88 in the same sanatorium.

Donald Trump wrote in his autobiography The Art of the Deal (1987) that she - unlike his reserved and humble father - had a keen sense of the dramatic and the grand, and that he owed part of his talent as an entertainer to her .

Controversy about the origin

The social origin of Donald Trump's mother has long been hidden. The legend went around that she was on a vacation trip to the USA and was introduced to her future husband Fred Trump by her sister Catherine at a party. After that, she returned to Scotland and was only in correspondence with Trump until the wedding. This was only corrected in May 2016 by an article in the Scottish newspaper The National . The origin of their in-laws ( Friedrich Trump and Elisabeth Christ ) from Germany was also kept secret until the 1980s (also in Donald Trump's autobiography The Art of the Deal from 1987) and instead the fiction spread that they immigrated from Sweden.

Mary Anne MacLeod's origins hit the headlines in May 2016 after Donald Trump campaigned for the thesis that a flood of immigrants taking low-paying jobs would keep US wages low, drive up unemployment, and immigration such economic refugees must therefore be regulated. The Scottish journalist Martin Hannan then researched and published the origin of Trump's mother and expressed the assumption that it was an "inconvenient truth" for the presidential candidate that his own mother (and her three immigrant sisters and their husbands, i.e. several of his aunts and Uncle) fit exactly into this scheme.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Martin Hannan: An inconvenient truth? Donald Trump's Scottish mother was a low-earning migrant . The National , May 21, 2016.
  2. ↑ a b c d Martin Hannan: The mysterious Mary Trump: The full untold story of how a young Scotswoman escaped to New York and raised a US presidential candidate . The National, May 21, 2016.
  3. ↑ Michael Kranish, Marc Fisher: Trump Revealed . Simon & Schuster, London 2017, p. 37.
  4. ^ Mary Pilon: Donald Trump's Immigrant Mother . The New Yorker , June 24, 2016.
  5. ↑ Tracie Rozhon: Fred C. Trump, Postwar Master Builder of Housing for Middle Class, Dies at 93rd Obituary. In: The New York Times , June 26, 1999.
personal data
SURNAME Trump, Mary Anne MacLeod
ALTERNATIVE NAMES NicLeòid, Màiri Anna
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Scottish-American mother of Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Tong , Lewis and Harris
DATE OF DEATH August 7, 2000
Place of death New Hyde Park , New York