The Blood Royal in the Oval Office

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, and from William the Lion, King of Scotland, through the colonial gateway ancestor Edward FitzRandolph of Massachusetts and New Jersey. The NEHGS also established that Obama is a distant cousin of both Bushes, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, James Madison, and Winston Churchill. A separate and widely circulated study, originally compiled by a twelve year old Californian student and reproduced across major outlets, claimed to trace forty two of forty three presidents back to King John, who sealed the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215, with Martin Van Buren, of overwhelmingly Dutch ancestry, as the sole exception. Professional genealogists regard many of these individual connections as plausible, given the dense intermarriage of colonial gentry families, while cautioning that some links in the longer chains remain undocumented.

The sceptic reasonably asks whether any of this is meaningful or merely a mathematical artefact. The answer is both, and the tension between those two possibilities is what makes the pattern worth examining.

The mathematics rest on a phenomenon called pedigree collapse. Every individual has two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and so on. The number doubles each generation. Go back thirty generations, roughly the distance to the Plantagenet era, and the arithmetic demands over a billion ancestors per person. But a billion people were not alive in thirteenth century Europe. Your family tree, in other words, cannot be a tree at all. It folds back on itself like origami, the same faces appearing on branch after branch. The statistician Joseph Chang of Yale University formalised this intuition in a landmark 1999 paper, modelling the point at which all ancestral lines converge. His conclusion: around the year 1400, just six centuries ago, there lived an individual from whom every person of European descent alive today can claim ancestry.

The implication is double edged. The presidential connections to royalty are less exclusive than they sound. Most readers of European ancestry almost certainly share these same medieval forebears. But what is remarkable is not the bloodline itself but the documented chain of transmission. Most of us descend from medieval kings through anonymous villagers whose names were never written down. The presidents descend through named gentry, recorded landowners, colonial magistrates, and established families whose pedigrees survived because they held power. The genealogy tracks not a genetic aristocracy but a social one: the durable advantage of families who kept records, held property, married strategically, and placed their children where further ascent was possible.

Judaism has a word for this. Yichus, lineage or pedigree, first appears in the Hebrew Bible in the Book of Ezra and remains central to communal life in observant communities. Yet Jewish tradition insists that yichus alone does not suffice. Rabbi Akiva, among the greatest of the Talmudic sages, was descended from converts. The priesthood of the Kohanim passes exclusively by patrilineal descent, but the Talmud records scholars declaring that learning matters more than parentage. The tension is ancient and unresolved: lineage opens doors, but what a person does once inside the room is what counts.

The American republic embodies the same unresolved tension. It was not founded to abolish inherited advantage. It was founded to relocate it. The colonial gentry who led the revolution were, overwhelmingly, the same Anglo Norman families who had prospered under the Crown. They replaced a monarchy with a republic, but they did not replace the class from which leaders were drawn. Two and a half centuries later, the statistical signature of that continuity remains legible in the family trees of the men who have held the presidency. The Magna Carta, sealed under duress by King John at Runnymede, seeded the constitutional tradition that his descendants would one day inherit in Philadelphia. The charter that constrained the Crown became the blueprint for the republic that replaced it.

And here the genealogy delivers its most striking line of descent. The same web of Plantagenet ancestry that connects Charles to nearly every occupant of the Oval Office also produced his paternal grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg. In 1943, in Nazi occupied Athens, Princess Alice sheltered Rachel Cohen and two of her children, Michel and Tilde, on the top floor of her residence while the other Cohen sons escaped to Egypt to join the Greek Free Forces. When the Gestapo came to question her, she used her lifelong deafness to deflect their interrogation. Yad Vashem later recognised her, posthumously, as Righteous Among the Nations. By her explicit wish, her remains were transferred in 1988 to the Church of St Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives, beneath its golden onion domes, just outside the Old City walls. Charles visited her grave in January 2020 and called her actions a source of “immense pride.”

The bloodline of Plantagenet kings produced presidents and tyrants, empire builders and colonial rebels. It also produced a deaf princess who hid Jews from the Gestapo and asked to be buried in Jerusalem. Yichus opens the door. What matters is the room you walk into, and whether you leave it empty or full.