Jeffrey Dudgeon: I was due to speak in defence of President Donald Trump but was cancelled due to BBC Northern Ireland bias

They were having Niall Stanage, a Washington-based local journalist, earlier, and then myself alongside a Professor Scott Lucas of University College Dublin. It seemed to be recognised that without my voice would have meant two anti-Trump voices and no balance.

I was cancelled at 7am and responded: “As expected, programme topped and tailed by anti-Trump speakers.”

I recognise that the late news of the adjourned Noah Donohoe inquest was the probable cause of the slot being shortened but I was inevitably the one that would be pulled.

In the event, both speakers made much of Trump's involvement in the 250th celebrations, as if he shouldn’t, and sneered at likely event failures. Their somewhat grating theme was the current divisive state of the country. As if America ever wasn’t divided, it being a democracy. Professor Lucas said he would celebrate the 4th July by attending Wicklow Pride. (BBC Radio Ulster's Sunday Sequence on the Sunday followed up with another anti-Trump guest.)

Knowing the two other voices were going to rubbish Trump and probably did not understand the country, I wanted to explain first and foremost that Trump was an American and president of the strongest nation in the world. He was not a confused or deluded Englishman.

The United States had been a rival power to Britain from 1783 and certainly until the 1940s as its strength grew beyond the Monroe Doctrine’s exclusion zone of Latin America. America became an imperial power, perhaps against its better judgment as it expanded west and south.

I intended to try to explain certain aspects, in particular that the American Revolutionary War lasted eight years from 1775 to 1783, there were some 25,000 killed on the American side while 60,000 British soldiers and loyalists died. It had strong elements of a civil war and ultimately resulted in the forced departure of 75,000 loyalists to Canada and the Caribbean. The Scots-Irish who were largely Presbyterians were a key element in the rebel forces, providing both military and intellectual heft. They had experience of clearing a frontier and were keen, like Andrew Jackson later, to open up to the west of the 13 colonies, something London had prohibited.

That Scots-Irish element is a dominant part of American culture to this day as heard in Country and Western music and exemplified by Vice-President JD Vance whose family hailed from Appalachia. The remarks in February to the Munich Security Conference by President Trump’s foreign minister Marco Rubio – that should obviously have been reported on BBC NI but wasn’t, and as far as I can see was only reported in the News Letter – were heartfelt and significant. The US Secretary of State said, “Our frontiers were shaped by Scots-Irish – that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong.”

I was a guest of the departing US Consul-General, James Applegate, at the 250th anniversary reception at his Ardnavalley residence on 25 June where he spoke admiringly of the Ulster Scots contribution to both the revolution and the development of his country. That the several hundred people present, from both communities, stood rigidly to attention for the Star-Spangled Banner was evidence of the affection in Northern Ireland for the US. (Playing the national anthem here is normally an occasion for dispute and rage).

Trump Derangement Syndrome is commonplace in both the United Kingdom and Ireland given right-wing English and left-wing Irish people loathe what he and America stands for. Only in Protestant Ulster and that non-woke section of Catholic Ireland is there genuine appreciation.

However I never got to say that when BBC Radio Ulster cancelled my invite, and not that of the two Trump critics.

Jeffrey Dudgeon, Belfast BT9