Gaza and Ukraine will show whether Trump is a true leader or just a bully

Donald Trump looked like the last king of Scotland.

To the skirl of bagpipes, the president welcomed Keir Starmer to one of his Scottish golfing palaces in his mother’s ancestral homeland. The prime minister flew in Monday as a guest and a supplicant in a corner of his own United Kingdom.

Starmer was a mere extra as Trump held court in a mind-bending news conference that rollicked through topics like his hatred of wind power, the window frames in his ballroom and Windsor Castle.

Trump capped his protocol-reversing day by flying the PM across Scotland on Air Force One to another of his exclusive clubs, in another ostentatious show of US power optics.

A day earlier, the top EU official, Ursula von der Leyen, matched Starmer’s effusiveness after arriving at Trump’s windswept Turnberry links for an audience bearing a trade deal that some Europeans blasted as a surrender.