Donald Trump “ignored” his mother’s community when he visited the island she once called home, even going so far as to steal pancakes from a family member without even saying “thank you,” says a distant cousin on his mother’s side.
As The Independent reports, Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, spent her formative years in the town of Tong, on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, a desolate archipelago in the North Sea that’s closer to Reykjavik than it is to Glasgow or Edinburgh. And though Mary emigrated to the U.S. in 1930, she and her family would often return to the islands to visit.
“My mum and dad were second cousins. Every time they were over here they came to [our house] for dinner,” says Alice Mackay, who is related to Trump on his mother’s side.
Mackay describes her cousin as a petty, selfish man who wasn’t above theft. She relates an incident that took place one day after her husband had died, when the Trumps were in town.
“He [Donald Trump] was here one morning I was busy making pancakes and he had forgotten my husband had died. He put a few pancakes in pocket [sic] and never said ‘cheerio’ or anything,” she said.
Even though Trump is fabulously wealthy, says Mackay, he hasn’t given “a penny” to help the residents of the island. That’s in contrast to his mother and his sister, both of whom donated to help the town and the families who live there.
“His sister gave a big donation to the hospice. Mary Anne gave money to the Tong centre as well. She was a lovely woman. They also asked Donald but he wouldn’t give a penny,” she said.
Even in his later years, Trump seemed to want little to do with his mother’s old town. In 2008, he stopped by the island, where he stayed for only a few hours. He spent all of a minute and a half in the house where his mother had grown up.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr , though Mary Trump would later come to love the trappings of wealth that came with her marriage to Fred Trump, she never forgot her poverty-stricken roots on the island. Another Trump cousin still living on the island, Mairi Sterland, said that Donald’s mother would have been “horrified” at who her son has become.