On her June 6, 2019, show, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow characterized Donald Trump's visit to Ireland as “a careening circus of pratfall embarrassments.” Most of the wince-inducing mortifications surfaced in the president's meeting with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar the preceding day during which Trump's ignorance and hubris were on full display. But the trip also exhibited more than low comedy. In the context of American presidents’ appearances in Ireland—Joe Biden's trip to Ireland in 2023 marked the seventh such occurrence—Trump's stay was uniquely disturbing and ironic, especially so given Peter Keegan's vision in Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island of a tranquil and beautiful country transmogrified by the “bustle” of tourists populating expensive hotels and playing golf assisted by child caddies. Prior to his arrival in Shannon, members of fifty political, human rights and anti-racism organizations that formed the Stop Trump Ireland coalition organized to protest his visit. The coalition includes Friends of the Irish Environment, which collected 100,000 signatures for a petition decrying the methods used by the Trump International Golf Club in Doonbeg to prevent erosion.

Such disdain, even outrage, is not unprecedented, as not every American president has basked in the Céad Mile Fáilte (100,000 welcomes) extended to Presidents Kennedy and Obama from huge audiences in Dublin, or felt the “rousing enthusiasm” Bill Clinton, the first president to visit Northern Ireland while in office, enjoyed in Belfast (Mitchell, Making Peace, 26). Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in, respectively, 1970 and 1984, were greeted warmly in the homes of their ancestors but, as I have described, demonstrators in Dublin hurled eggs at Nixon while others burned his effigy at the American embassy. In an impromptu ceremony, eight graduates of Galway's University College set fire to their degrees, and three holders of an honorary doctorate of law degrees returned or “de-conferred” them, in response to Reagan's receipt of his honorary degree (Booth, “Reagan Booed”).