When Donald Trump speaks today, he does so as a man who believes power is something to be taken, not balanced, and that belief did not appear by accident.
Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, left Stornoway for America in the early twentieth century, carrying with her the values of a hard edged island culture shaped by scarcity, endurance and survival.
His father, Fred Trump, was born to German immigrants in New York and built his wealth through ruthless property development in the city, where winning mattered more than reputation and dominance mattered more than trust.
Somewhere between those two influences sits the man we see now, driven by grievance, obsessed with leverage, and convinced that force of will is the only currency that counts.
Trump has always told us who he is, most clearly in The Art of the Deal, a book less about negotiation than intimidation, where you ask for everything, offer nothing, and humiliate the other side until they give in.
That approach works in certain corners of business, particularly where regulation is weak and relationships are disposable, but it becomes corrosive when transferred wholesale into government.
As president, Trump has increasingly bypassed Congress, relied on executive orders, and treated constitutional limits as inconveniences rather than foundations.
Supporters call this strength, but strength without restraint is not leadership, it is coercion dressed up as decisiveness.
The Greenland episode exposes the pattern clearly, because what is framed as national security reads more like a property acquisition, with strategic language masking the pursuit of resources and leverage.
This is deal making logic applied to geopolitics, where allies are pressured, norms are ignored, and outcomes are judged only by who bends first.
For people in the Highlands and Islands, this style feels uncomfortably familiar, because our communities understand power imbalance better than most.
We know what it looks like when decisions are made far away by people who do not live with the consequences.
We know what happens when land, resources and strategic value matter more than people.
What makes Trump dangerous is not that he declares himself a dictator, but that he behaves as though the role already permits it.
Democracy does not end with a speech or a uniform, it erodes when leaders repeatedly cross lines and nothing happens.
The United States was designed to prevent this exact scenario, yet those protections rely on good faith, and good faith cannot survive a worldview built on domination.
Trump may not be America’s first president to push the limits of power, but he is the first to do so openly, proudly, and with the language of personal gain.
The harder question is whether he will be the last, because once a system learns to tolerate behaviour like this, it rarely forgets.
If Trump’s story tells us anything, it is that where you come from matters, but what you choose to become matters more.
And if America wants to avoid turning deal making into dictatorship, it will need to remember that leadership is not about winning every hand, but about knowing when not to play one at all.
