September 19, 2025
JamRadio UK | Political Analysis
Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK this week was a spectacle of pomp, protest, and paradox. Crowned with a £150 billion tech deal and a warm reception from King Charles, the visit also reignited a debate that cuts to the heart of Trump’s political identity: how does a man born of an immigrant mother become the face of anti-immigration extremism?
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Enter Bonnie Greer, playwright, author, and chancellor of Kingston University, who delivered one of the most searing critiques of Trump’s legacy on BBC Question Time last night.
“Donald Trump’s own mother was an immigrant… The irony, the sick dangerous irony of this man, is the United States is now being asked to turn in on itself and destroy itself from its own base.”
“Donald Trump’s own mother was an immigrant… the irony of this man… is the United States is now being asked to turn in on itself”
— BBC Question Time (@bbcquestiontime) September 18, 2025
Bonnie Greer says the USA “prided” itself on being a “nation of immigrants”, and this foundation is being broken apart by Trump#bbcqt pic.twitter.com/O6XEJ6RsA8
Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was born in the remote village of Tong on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland. She immigrated to the United States in 1930 with just $50 in her pocket, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen in 1942. Her Gaelic accent and working-class roots were no secret—and yet, her son has built a political empire on vilifying immigrants who arrive with even less.
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Greer didn’t stop there. She described Trump’s America as a place where migrants are “sent to the twilight zone,” deported to countries they’ve never known, and stripped of due process.
“You do not in the US ever have somebody jump out of a truck with a mask on their face, take you down, take you to a prison, and put you somewhere where you don’t know where you are,” she said.
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The irony deepens when you consider Trump’s maternal heritage. While British nationality law at the time didn’t automatically grant citizenship to children born abroad to British mothers, Trump may still hold a valid claim to British nationality by descent, according to legal interpretations cited by Cosmopolis and other nationality experts.
And yet, during his visit, Trump urged Prime Minister Keir Starmer to deploy the British military against migrants crossing the Channel, a move that stunned even hardened critics. The man whose mother crossed an ocean for a better life now advises Britain to meet migrants with armed force. His rhetoric doesn’t just ignore his family’s past, it actively erases it.
In a moment when Britain is reckoning with its own immigration legacy, from Windrush to Rwanda, Trump’s advice to Starmer feels less like diplomacy and more like provocation. And Bonnie Greer’s words cut through the noise:
“What can we learn from Donald Trump? Nothing.”
