'I feel Scottish,' says Donald Trump on flying visit to mother's cottage
Donald Trump pays a flying visit to his mother's birthplace in Tong, on the island of Lewis, Scotland
Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent
Monday 9 June 2008 11.29 EDT
Last modified on Thursday 7 January 2016 14.20 EST
Donald Trump may have the world's most famous comb-over, but it wasn't built for the stiff Hebridean wind that bowled down the runway at Stornoway airport today.
As the US tycoon stepped off his personalised Boeing 727 and onto the tarmac on the isle of Lewis, a playful gust undid his artfully contrived hairdo, blowing long wisps of his trademark ducktail skywards.
It briefly hung in the air like an impromptu halo, and was the only misstep in a minutely choreographed homecoming for the world's most famous property developer. His mother's modest birthplace - a pebble-dashed croft house in the straggling township of Tong - sits just across the bay.
Trump was travelling from an Elton John concert in Boston to the oil-rich city of Aberdeen, where he will give evidence tomorrow at a public inquiry into his plans to spend £1bn on creating the "greatest golf course anywhere in the world". This was a day when a rich slice of New York bling landed in the Western Isles.
From the 727 - the block capitals "TRUMP" gleaming in gold on its black fuselage - assistants unloaded several boxes of his own autographed homilies to wealth-creation as gifts for the first and second cousins, who had assembled for a brief audience in the airport's nearby air traffic control building.
Cases stamped "Trump: How to get rich" and "Never give up" were carefully loaded into the boot of the island's only Porsche Cayenne 4x4 - a gleaming black vehicle requisitioned for the day from a local millionaire by the Trump Organisation.
Ever since he first unveiled his proposals in 2006 to create his exclusive golf resort, complete with an eight-storey five-star hotel, 950 timeshare apartments and a Trump Boulevard at the Menie estate, north of Aberdeen, Trump has boasted repeatedly of his Scottish roots.
His mother Mary Anne - who left Tong in 1930 aged 18 for a holiday in New York, met a local builder named Trump and stayed - was his inspiration, he said today. She was a "wonderful" and "beautiful" woman, he said. "I think this land is special, I think Scotland is special, and I wanted to do something special for my mother," he told a press conference in Stornoway.
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