US President Donald Trump will arrive in the United Kingdom at the end of one of the most tumultuous weeks in the country’s recent political history.

When UK Prime Minister Theresa May steps out of the chaos of her Conservative Government’s near collapse to greet the American President, her battle wounds will still be visible – inflicted by two high-profile Cabinet resignations and rumblings of a leadership challenge over her handling of the UK’s exit from the European Union. 

May lost her pretender to the Prime Ministerial throne, former Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, and the hapless Brexiteer-in-Chief, David Davis, who once harbored Prime Ministerial ambitions of his own.

There’s a strange symmetry to events. Trump is set to arrive in the UK on the same day as the UK government publishes its white paper setting out in more details May's controversial offer to the EU on future relations after Brexit.

Trump and Brexit are historical twins of a kind: the children of a long unwinding of the post-1945 international order and the eclipse of the West by the forces of transnational capital and the newly assertive geopolitical and financial beneficiaries, notably Russia. The Trump and Brexit phenomena converge around a deep antagonism to the European Union project, spurred on by the new boys on the geopolitical block, led by Vladimir Putin. 

The European Union represents one of the most successful attempts to confront the whirlwinds of globalization and has become a populist target of resurgent right wing forces on both sides of the Atlantic.

From Belfast to Glasgow, from Cardiff to London, angry UK citizens are planning to mark the American President’s visit with a series of good humored rallies and protests, including the launch of a blimp that will take to the skies over London. The surreal agitprop that will hover over marchers participating in a "carnival of protest" in London on Friday is an inflatable in the shape of Trump as an orange-tinted infant baby, or enfant terrible. The inflatable has been dubbed: "Hairpiece One."

To add insult to injury, the move is sanctioned by the capital’s Greater London Authority and endorsed by the Labour Party Mayor of London Sadiq Khan.

Khan captured the popular mood in the capital and throughout the country when he welcomed news that Trump had cancelled an earlier plan to visit earlier this year. On that occasion, the president had been expected to cut the ribbon at the new US Embassy building. The London mayor said Trump had “got the message” that many Londoners staunchly opposed his policies and actions.

The re-instated presidential visit is a stripped-down, carefully-choreographed affair designed – above all – to save blushes all around and cocoon Trump from the mass mobilization that his presence will spark on the streets. At least 50,000 people are expected to take to the streets of London alone. 

Trump's personal behavior and authoritarian politics deeply offend large sections of the host population, where memories of his "locker-room" bragging about sexual assault, and treatment of families and children seeking to enter the United States, have caused outrage. 

His left-wing detractors regard Trump as a dangerous "neo-fascist," a reactionary cipher for an all-out assault on Western liberal democratic values. He is regarded as the personification of what the great American writer, Sheldon Wolin, has described as "inverted totalitarianism" – a managed or illiberal version of democracy colonized by the market and consumerist ethos of spectacle.

Trump's tour will include a military parade at Winston Churchill's birthplace of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, talks with Prime Minister May at her Chequers country home, and tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle. He will then travel to Scotland, where he and First Lady Melania Trump will spend the weekend in what is, ostensibly, his migrant family homeland on his mother’s side. It is a place where he could also contact the deep roots of aspects of his own personality.

Donald John, or Dòmnall Iain, is one of the most common names on the Isle of Lewis, the birthplace of Donald Trump’s ancestors. It translates, from the Latin and Norse roots, as domand val, as The Ruler of the World.

In a wide-ranging interview, the writer, activist and ecologist, Alastair McIntosh, has raised an intriguing possibility that Donald Trump's personality and behavior can be traced back to traumatic 19th-century clearances and evictions in southern and western Lewis (Pairc and Uig).

The subsequent shortages of land and poverty on the Scottish island drove Donald Trump's mother, Mary McLeod, and other members of his family, to migrate to America in the early part of the 20th century.

If McIntosh's thesis is accurate, that the president carries a "wound to his primal integrity from places that he probably doesn't even know about," compromised in "his capacity even to have an inner life as distinct from it all being on the outside – cut off by his deracination, his uprooting," there is a deep irony.

It also goes a long way to explain why this son of a migrant family is radically out of touch with the debt his own family owes to America's open arms.

(Cover Photo: An online petition to fly a Donald Trump blimp over London during the president's visit has almost 6,000 signatures. /VCG Photo)