From wikipedia.org / © The White House
It’s difficult these days to find anyone outside the borders of the USA who likes President Donald J. Trump. Not after he insisted on imposing tariffs on nearly everyone else in the world, from Canada and the European Union to remote Antarctic islands whose populations are limited to penguins. Not after he launched his ham-fisted ‘military operation’ against Iran – and was seemingly blindsided by the fact that Iran, a country bordering the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for the world’s oil supplies, promptly retaliated by blocking that artery. Didn’t see that one coming, did you, Donny?
There certainly wasn’t much love for Trump displayed when he landed in Ireland – the southern part – at the weekend and protestors marched through the streets of Dublin carrying signs saying things like: ‘DONALD TRUMP, YOU FLEW ALL THE WAY TO IRELAND JUST TO FIND WE DON’T F*CKING LIKE YOU EITHER. NOW F*CK OFF HOME.’ They also carried some graphic Trump-shaped balloons, in the act of getting it up the butt from other human-shaped balloons, including a Benjamin Netanyahu one. Later, on his golf course at Doonbeg in Country Clare, four protestors arranged themselves in a line and bent their bodies into the forms of four letters: ‘T’, ‘N’, ‘U’ and ‘C’. I may have got the order of the spelling wrong.
However, there’s one group of non-American people who believe Trump is the absolute bees’ knees. In fact, you’ll find them in another part of the island of Ireland. I’m talking about Northern Ireland’s hard-right-wing, fiercely pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). They love Trump. Well, they did until very recently.
This is unsurprising. There are many similarities between the views of the DUP and those of Trump and his cult-like Make America Great Again (MAGA) followers. The MAGA faithful contain many evangelical Christians who believe stuff like the reason no dinosaurs exist today is because they were too large to get on board Noah’s Ark. Similarly, the DUP includes among its ranks such God-bothering, science-hating specimens as Thomas Buchanan, Member of the Northern Irish Assembly (MLA) for West Tyrone and a campaigner for the teaching of creationism in schools, who rejects evolution as a “peddled lie” because, he reckons, “the world was spoken into existence in six days by His power”.
Trump and MAGA’s contempt for science is expressed most clearly in their claim that man-made climate change isn’t happening and is all a hoax – a convenient belief for Trump to have, seeing how much money fossil fuel companies pumped into his election campaigns – despite the fact that 97% of actively-publishing climate scientists agree that climate-warming in the past century is highly likely because of human activities.
From wikipedia.org / © UK Parliament
That’s also the DUP’s stance, articulated especially by Sammy Wilson, currently Member of Parliament for East Antrim. It was mind-melting that Wilson served as Environment Minister at the Northern Irish Assembly from 2008 to 2009. During his tenure, he blocked a government advertising campaign designed to encourage people to cut their energy consumption and reduce C02 emissions. He also described climate activists as a ‘hysterical pseudo-religion’. And he said, “The tactic used by the ‘green gang is to label anyone who dares disagree with their view of climate change as some kind of nutcase who denies scientific fact.” Talk about incriminating yourself.
Like Trump and his adherents, the DUP likes nothing better than to dump on minorities. These might be people of colour. When ethnic minorities were targeted and burned out of their homes during a riot in Belfast in June, it was as much their fault – ‘problematic foreign cultures’ – as that of the rioters and arsonists, according to certain DUP politicians.
Or they might be members of the LGBTQ community. See comments by Buchanan and Iris Robinson, senior DUP figure and wife of one-time DUP leader Peter Robinson, about homosexuality being an ‘abomination’, or Trevor Clarke, MLA for South Antrim, who until 2016 believed that HIV affected gay people only. Oddly for a party that chants endlessly about Northern Ireland being as ‘British’ as the rest of the UK, it opposed the province allowing same-sex marriage (which finally happened in 2020) at a time when same-sex marriage was legal in England, Scotland and Wales.
Like Trump, the DUP has a fondness for lining their pockets and for dark money. For instance, there was the ultra-dodgy Renewable Heat Incentive, or ‘cash-for-ash’ scheme, which was introduced in 2012 while Arlene Foster – later to be DUP leader and Northern Irish First Minister – ran Northern Ireland’s Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment. Ostensibly, this encouraged people to switch from fossil fuel to biomass heating systems. In reality, it meant unscrupulous farmers – many of them no doubt DUP voters – could set up biomass heating systems in empty cowsheds and still claim back £1.60 for every £1 they spent. The scheme’s believed to have cost taxpayers some £400 million.
And then there was a £425,000 donation to the DUP from the shady anti-Scottish-independence organisation the Constitutional Research Council, rumoured to have really originated in Saudi Arabia, India or even Putin’s Russia. In 2016, in the run-up to the referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union, £282,000 of this was spent by the DUP on a ‘Vote Leave’ advertisement in a newspaper that wasn’t even published in Northern Ireland.
Trump is a man who proclaims his Christianity and does photo-ops with the Bible when there’s right-wing American Christian voters to woo, yet happily does such un-Christian things as cheat on his wife and have a fling with a pornographic movie actress, or brag about his technique with the ladies, which is mainly to ‘grab ‘em by the pussy.’ He has kindred spirits in the supposedly fiercely Christian DUP. For instance, there was the 2009 scandal involving Iris Robinson, who had an extramarital affair with a lad young enough to be her grandson and also illegally procured some £50,000 to help him with a business project.
Earlier, in 1996, Sammy Wilson was involved in a stushie when the Sunday World newspaper published photos of him and his ex-girlfriend romping nakedly during a holiday in France. Funnily enough, Wilson went on to denounce breast-feeding in public as ‘exhibitionism’. In Wilson’s world-view, it’s obvious that ‘bare boobs during naked holiday romps = good’, but ‘bare boobs for feeding hungry babies = bad’.
Maybe the most striking overlap between Trumpism and the DUP are sexual assault cases involving their leaders. E. Jean Caroll claimed Trump sexually assaulted her in the mid-1990s and brought two civil lawsuits against him, which were decided in her favour – though Trump is currently pestering the Supreme Court about an appeal. It may or may not be a coincidence that he’s mentioned 38,000 times in Justice Department files relating to the activities of the late child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Eptstein. Meanwhile, in 2026, Newry Crown Court found Jeffrey Donaldson, leader of the DUP from 2021 to 2024, guilty of “18 charges: one count of rape, four of gross indecency, and 13 of indecent assault.”
From the Belfast Telegraph
Given all these alignments, it was no surprise that in 2020 when Trump was campaigning for re-election after his first term as president (and lost, although ever since then he’s been lying that he won), three DUP MPs – Wilson, Paul Girvan and Ian Paisley Jr – were photographed posing with a banner saying ‘TRUMP – 2020 – KEEP AMERICA GREAT!’ outside the Houses of Parliament. Paisley Jr claimed to be ‘good friends’ with Trump and “added that the president keeps a framed picture of himself with his father, the former First Minister of Northern Ireland who died in 2014.”
As one-time MP for North Antrim, Paisley Jr got “suspended from the Commons for thirty sitting days, for not declaring visits to Sri Lanka paid for by the Sri Lankan government and for breaking the Commons rule banning paid advocacy…”, i.e., for accepting “very expensive hospitality, for himself and his family, from an overseas government accused of serious human rights violations.” He got into similar bother over an undisclosed trip to the Maldives. So the former MP for North Antrim, Sri Lanka and the Maldives is obviously a man after Trump’s heart.
Anyway, I’ve been roaring with laughter since the weekend. During his sojourn in southern Ireland, Trump threw his staunchly pro-British DUP admirers under the bus when he opined about the future of Ireland, north and south. “I will tell you,” he said during a press conference with the taoiseach Michael Martin, “I’d love to see it unified… You know what? The way I look at it, it’s going to happen eventually. It may as well happen now… The UK will have something to say about it, obviously. But I think it would be a great thing. I mean, how can it be bad?” Later, he doubled down on what he’d said. “Many people agree. I made what I considered to be a fairly routine comment. I have had so much support on that.”
The moral of this story is that, once again, there is zero point in sucking up to Trump. No matter how oleaginous you are towards him, he will, sooner or later, through malice, narcissism, stupidity or dementia, or a combination of all four, crap all over you.
Ian Paisley Jr retorted: “Everyone is allowed a personal opinion even when it’s wrong.” Accusing Trump of being wrong? Oh dear, Ian. That framed picture of you and your dad may not be hanging on the White House wall for much longer.
From wikipedia.org / © UK Parliament
