Gavan Reilly: Donald Trump only remembers the last thing he hears…and that’s McGregor

The first thing to clarify upfront is that the timing of the Taoiseach’s visit was not some kind of slur. The formalities of the day in Washington have evolved significantly over the years, and now include a lunch hosted on Capitol Hill by the Speaker of House of Representatives, at which the Friends of Ireland caucus are in attendance. By fluke of the calendar this year, last Wednesday was the final sitting before the House adjourned for two weeks - so had the formalities taken place on Monday, there’d have been nobody to attend the lunch.

The American side thought it better to bring the events forward, and offer the traditional full programme, rather than marking St Patrick’s Day with a slimmed down programme of events - even if the sincerity of this was somewhat diluted by the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, referring to the White House architect James Hoban as coming from county “Kill-ke-nny”.

The timing was not a dig. But in both optics and substance, having Conor McGregor in the Oval office on Saint Patrick’s Day certainly feels like one.

In normal times, it would be unthinkable for someone recently found liable for rape in a civil trial, to grace the office of the most powerful person in the world. But of course these are not normal times, and Conor McGregor’s appearance in the Oval Office is hardly out of kilter given that Donald Trump himself has been found similarly liable in a civil case. Imagine how Nikita Hand must have felt, watching her attacker swanning around as some kind of self-appointed national ambassador. Then imagine how E. Jean Carroll feels, seeing her own attacker legitimately winning an election with the support of 77.3 million people.

The biggest danger for Ireland’s (actual) leaders is that Donald Trump has a famed weakness for dealing with multiple conflicting inputs. Many of his biographers, including Michael Wolff who enjoys a certain imprimatur as Trump’s preferred author, have written that Trump has a relatively short attention span and is often influenced, on a crucial decision, by the last thing he has heard. Consequently many of his advisors are said to loiter around the doors as the President is leaving a meeting room, hoping to get the final word in a discussion.

I wrote on the Chronicle website last week, fresh out of the Oval Office, that if the Irish officials who attended last Wednesday’s events were happy with their performance, it can only be because Micheál Martin was not ambushed, or cajoled, in the same way as Volodymyr Zelenskyy two weeks earlier. The downside of that – and of Trump using 50 minutes of their allotted hour to take media questions, effectively downgrading the meeting to a ten-minute meet-and-greet.

How much substance could properly have been entertained in those ten minutes? There could hardly have been time to introduce the multiple other handlers in the room, let alone get down to brass tacks about tariffs, or corporate taxes, or the legitimate benefits of American pharmaceutical companies having footprints in Ireland. The ‘public’ bit of the meeting saw polite, but naked, disagreements about those issues and more, including frankly absurd questions about whether Ireland should have vetoed the immigration of Rosie O’Donnell. The private bit can’t have gotten any further into the weeds of real issues.

Compare that ten-minute event, clouded by handlers and advisors who will all want to have contributed too, to the apparently lengthy solo visit McGregor was able to manage – and the breadth of issues that he’ll have chosen to take on. His two-minute ramble at the Briefing Room podium, complaining that Americans would soon have no homeland to visit because of Ireland’s immigration policies, is a hint at the sort of guff to which Trump, Elon Musk, Robert F Kennedy and others will have been exposed, unchallenged, by the final Irish voice in the room.

McGregor has made no secret of his aspirations to become President of Ireland, even if his public pronouncements appear to bear no resemblance to what the job actually entails - his many tweets on the matter, and on the governance of Ireland, have been both morally mirobund and constitutionally illiterate. Though, in fairness, McGregor would hardly be the first candidate with enough ego to put their name forward, and too little cop-on to realise what the job requires.

It’s worth remembering what the criteria are for getting on the ballot paper in the first place. Candidates will need the backing of 20 Oireachtas members, or the sponsorship of four local authorities. The former route is almost certainly impossible for someone of McGregor’s leanings to fulfil: while there are a significant number of independent TDs and Senators, they’ll be more likely to back a more familiar candidate (i.e. one of themselves) than publicly attach their names to someone with such a blemished history.

The route will only get harder in local authorities; most analysis suggests getting nominated via councils in 2025 will be slightly tougher than in 2018 and 2011. Assuming Fine Gael and Sinn Féin run their own candidates (so refuse to back any others), and assuming Fianna Fáil choose not to facilitate McGregor at any turn, there are only four possible councils with enough remaining councillors to force an approval. Three of those are in Dublin where there are sufficient Labour and Social Democrats members who simply can’t get behind him.

So there is little chance of McGregor getting onto the ballot paper. But the real risk to Irish discourse is not that McGregor will get onto a TV debate – it’s that the mere pursuit of an unwinnable cause, will instigate the inevitable pile-ons from Musk and others who will rally their online legions to complain at left-wing and independent councillors across the country will not lend their support.

Those councillors can expect to be pilloried from all corners as being subservient to the dilution of Irishness in Ireland, to the terminal loss of culture and ethnicity, or some other similar horseshit, from people sitting adjacent to the most powerful office in the world.

We’ve already seen the likes of Musk and JD Vance openly taking sides in the German election; we will soon see it happen in Ireland. To think, we were warned that the overseas threat to Irish democracy would come from Eastern subversives… when the real threat is coming from the White House.