Trump’s Love Affair With the Royal Family Dates Back to His Mother

One of President Trump’s earliest memories, one he routinely recounts to journalists and biographers, is of watching his mother watch television, so enthralled that she barely moved for hours, on the day in 1953 that Queen Elizabeth was crowned.

He was only 6 years old, but he understood that the gilded spectacle unfolding more than 3,400 miles away inside Westminster Abbey struck a chord in his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, a poor girl who had immigrated from Scotland and who had worked for a time as a housemaid in a grand mansion. He also understood that, for some reason, the same spectacle offended his father.

“I also remember my father that day, pacing around impatiently, ‘For Christ’s sake, Mary,’ he said, ‘enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists,’ ” Mr. Trump recalled, years later. “My mother didn’t even look up. They were total opposites in that sense.”

Mr. Trump tells this story in his book “The Art of the Deal” as an explanation for why he was not satisfied with simply inheriting his father’s business. His mother had passed on a love of spectacle and grandeur, as expressed in the coronation — “loftier dreams” of “splendor and magnificence.”

The story also explains why this week’s visit to Britain matters to the president, who throughout his life has expressed a desire to be close to, or on an equal footing with, the British royal family. Though Mr. Trump met the queen for tea at Windsor Castle last year, the event was marred by a gaffe when he walked ahead of her while reviewing troops, and it lacked the pageantry of a state dinner at Buckingham Palace.