When Donald Trump took to Truth Social during King Charles’s April state visit to Washington and quipped that he had “always wanted to live in Buckingham Palace,” he was responding to genealogical research showing that he and the British monarch are fifteenth cousins, both descended from the third Earl of Lennox, a great grandson of King James II of Scotland. The revelation was treated as a charming footnote to the pomp of the 250th anniversary celebrations. It is considerably more than that. The bloodline that connects an American president to the British Crown also runs, by a different branch, to a grave on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

The research, conducted by the genealogist Robert Barrett and highlighted by the royal biographer Robert Hardman, traces Trump’s lineage through the Earl of Lennox’s daughter Lady Helen, into the Clan Mackay via the Earls of Sutherland, and onward through successive Highland generations before crossing the Atlantic with his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod of Lewis, who emigrated in 1930. The ancestral path also connects Trump to the very monarch the colonies threw off in 1776: George III. A president whose political brand is built on radical sovereignty turns out to share a bloodline with the sovereign his nation was founded to reject.

But Trump is not an outlier. He is the norm. Gary Boyd Roberts, who spent decades as Senior Research Scholar at the New England Historic Genealogical Society and authored the definitive study Ancestors of American Presidents, documented royal descents across a striking number of Oval Office occupants. His research established that Barack Obama, the son of a Kansan mother and a Kenyan father, descends from Edward I of England through the Eltonhead and Conway families,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)