“What would you say to him if you met him?” I asked one student, Emma.
“Great work, President Trump. God bless America” — was her response.
Another student, Steph, simply told me that if she gave her opinion, she’d end up on the FBI blacklist.
Trump visited Scotland from 25 to 29 July on a definitely-not-a-golfing-holiday “work trip”. Between holes, the President found time to greet Prime Minister Keir Starmer and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen.
The first thing you notice when you talk to Edinburgh students is that they seldom find anything serious to say about it. Despite protest attempts to halt the visit, there was no stopping it.
Ironic, though Emma’s statement was, she continued: “The only thing that would get a genuine reaction from Trump [is to ask which] is the best Scottish golf course.”
Cieran had a similar response: “He’s not going to take anything I say seriously, so why would I take him seriously? Talking to him won’t make him change his mind on the policies I disagree with, so what is the point?”
Perhaps it is the impossibility of having a meaningful conversation with him. Perhaps it is his lack of political engagement with his state visits, but when Trump is in town, Edinburgh students believe that trying to engage with him seriously doesn’t aid in getting across the resentment they have for his geopolitical mishandlings.
There is a sense that these state visits are nothing less than a self-indulgent spectacle that aims to keep the discourse firmly centred on Trump. The students I spoke to seem to know this, and they turn their backs.
Trump spent a lot of the trip playing golf, and one student, David, commented on this recent video that appears to show one of his drivers dropping a golf ball to give the president an advantage: “Oh, Trump would have wanted everyone to see that. It’s just yet another plot device to keep the [news cycle] about him.”
“He can just deny that it was cheating, and a lot of people will accept that as fact.”
Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0