Donald Trump encountered some difficulty during his comments to the media ahead of his meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday, as the president’s own bagpiper played loudly through his opening statements.
The president is meeting with his British counterpart at his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland this morning, where the pair were expected to discuss a range of issues from trade to the war in Gaza. The piper had apparently been invited to play at Trump’s course as Starmer arrived—blasting out a performance close enough to the leaders to make it difficult to hear what they were saying to assembled reporters.
After the noise eventually piped down, Trump appeared at pains to sing his own praises during what remained of his pre-talk press conference with Starmer. “If I weren’t around, right now you’d have six major wars going on,” he was finally heard to tell reporters.
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“Nobody’s ever done what we’ve done,” the president went on. “We’ve done a lot. It’s an honor to do it. It’s not hard for me to do it.”
Trump’s self-administered pick-me-up follows a rocky weekend visit to the northernmost of the United Kingdom’s four nations. Though the president’s mother was born in Scotland, more than 70 percent of Scots have a dim view of his policies and politics, at a rate roughly 10 percent higher than across the U.K. overall.
His arrival earlier on Friday was hardly met with a warm welcome. Heralded ahead of time by a front-page spread from Scottish daily newspaper The National that read “CONVICTED US FELON TO ARRIVE IN SCOTLAND,” protesters lined up along the side of the road as his motorcade made its way from Glasgow to his Turnberry resort, many of them holding up signs taking potshots at the president over the ongoing Epstein Files furor.
Demonstrations continued in at least three Scottish cities throughout the weekend, including outside the U.S. consulate in Edinburgh, as well as outside his Turnberry resort and Trump International Scotland in Aberdeen, where one protest group has installed a sign that reads: “Twinned with Epstein Island.”
Trump has spent much of his time in Scotland so far playing the green (accompanied by an armored golf cart), which would nevertheless appear to have done little to assuage his reported behind-the-scenes anger over his administration’s handling of the Epstein crisis—admitting to reporters Sunday, “I’m actually not in a good mood.”
Those comments came hot on the heels of a meeting with European Union President Ursula von der Leyen that yielded a new trade deal with the bloc, though the arrangement’s since been slammed by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board as “odd” for what the newspaper describes as mostly “abandoning [his] goals” in trade relations with the continent.
