The Day I Found Myself Agreeing with Trump

There are sentences one does not particularly expect to write.

Author: Petra Polonkai

As an Irish barrister, a Hungarian by birth and someone who has spent a considerable part of her professional life thinking about law, constitutional structures and European politics, I certainly never expected to write this one:

Donald Trump made me stop and think about a United Ireland.

Not because he produced a sophisticated constitutional argument. He did not. Not because he unveiled a carefully researched economic model for Irish reunification. He did not do that either.

In fact, what made the moment remarkable was precisely the opposite.

During his visit to Ireland in September 2026, the American President was asked what he thought about Irish reunification. His answer was characteristically uncomplicated. He said that he would love to see Ireland unified, that he believed it would eventually happen, and asked a question which, stripped of more than a century of history, politics, identity and bloodshed, sounded almost absurdly simple:

How could it be bad?

For anyone familiar with Irish history, there are approximately several thousand pages of material available in response.

And yet, for a moment, I found myself agreeing with Donald Trump.

That requires some explanation.

For readers outside Ireland, even the terminology can be confusing. Ireland is an island containing two separate political jurisdictions. The Republic of Ireland is an independent state and a member of the European Union. Northern Ireland occupies six counties in the north east of the island and forms part of the United Kingdom.

There is no physical border in the conventional European sense between them. One can drive from Dublin to Belfast without encountering a border post, passport control or customs barrier. The road signs change. The currency changes from euro to sterling. Kilometres become miles. Different laws apply. But there is no checkpoint announcing that one state has ended and another has begun.

That apparently unremarkable fact represents one of the great political achievements of modern European history.

Understanding why requires going back more than a century.

Ireland was part of the United Kingdom throughout the nineteenth century, although political movements seeking varying degrees of Irish self government had existed for generations. Following the Easter Rising of 1916, the subsequent War of Independence and a profound transformation in Irish politics, the constitutional relationship between Britain and Ireland became impossible to maintain in its existing form.

Partition emerged during this period.

The Government of Ireland Act 1920, passed by the British Parliament, provided for two separate parliaments on the island: one for Northern Ireland and another for Southern Ireland. The arrangement reflected, among other things, the concentration of unionists, predominantly Protestant and strongly attached to the United Kingdom, in the north east.

Northern Ireland consisted of six of the nine counties of the historic province of Ulster: Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone.

Following the Anglo Irish Treaty of 1921, what became the Irish Free State emerged as an independent political entity, while Northern Ireland remained within the United Kingdom. The modern Republic of Ireland eventually developed from the Free State.

That description, however, makes an extraordinarily painful history sound almost administrative.

It was anything but.

Northern Ireland contained two large communities with fundamentally different understandings of nationality and constitutional belonging. Broadly speaking, unionists, historically predominantly Protestant, regarded themselves as British and wished Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom. Nationalists, historically predominantly Catholic, regarded themselves as Irish and generally favoured some form of Irish unity.

Those descriptions are useful, but imperfect. Identity in Northern Ireland has always been more complicated than two boxes on a form, and it has become considerably more so in recent decades.

For much of the twentieth century, however, the division was profound.

From the late 1960s Northern Ireland entered the period known simply as the Troubles. Republican paramilitary organisations, most prominently the Provisional IRA, pursued the objective of ending British rule in Northern Ireland and achieving Irish reunification. Loyalist paramilitary organisations used violence in defence of Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom. British security forces were heavily involved in the conflict.

Bombings, shootings, assassinations, sectarian murders and civil disorder became part of life. More than 3,500 people were killed.

The conflict also extended beyond Northern Ireland. Bombs exploded in Dublin, London and elsewhere. Political language hardened. Communities became physically and psychologically segregated. The question of whether six counties should belong to one state or another became inseparable from grief, identity and memory.

Then came 1998.

The Belfast Agreement, generally known as the Good Friday Agreement, transformed the constitutional landscape.

Its achievement was not to answer the question of whether Ireland should eventually be united.

Its achievement was to create a democratic mechanism through which that question could remain unanswered without requiring people to kill one another over it.

That distinction is essential.

The Agreement recognised that Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom for as long as a majority of its people wished it to remain so. Equally, it recognised that if a majority were someday to choose a United Ireland, both the British and Irish governments would be obliged to respect that democratic decision.

This became known as the principle of consent.

The Agreement also recognised something unusually sophisticated about identity. A person in Northern Ireland may identify as British, Irish or both. The constitutional settlement was designed not to force one identity to defeat the other.

Ireland subsequently amended its Constitution. Article 3 now states that it is the firm will of the Irish nation to unite the people of the island, but expressly recognises that a United Ireland can come about only by peaceful means and with democratic consent in both jurisdictions.

British law contains the corresponding mechanism.

Under the Northern Ireland Act 1998, Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom unless a majority voting in a referendum chooses otherwise. The British Secretary of State must call such a poll if it appears likely that a majority would vote for Northern Ireland to leave the United Kingdom and become part of a United Ireland.

This referendum is generally called a border poll.

There is therefore nothing revolutionary, legally speaking, about discussing Irish reunification. The possibility is built into the constitutional architecture of both states and into the peace agreement governing relations between them.

What remains extraordinarily sensitive is the question of when that discussion moves from theoretical possibility to practical politics.

And Northern Ireland has changed.

The society created in 1921 is not the society that exists today.

For decades Northern Ireland had a clear Protestant and unionist majority. Demographic and political changes have gradually altered that balance. The 2021 census demonstrated how much more complex identity has become. People describe themselves as British, Irish, Northern Irish or combinations of those identities. Religion, nationality and constitutional preference can no longer safely be treated as interchangeable categories.

Political representation has changed as well.

In the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly election, Sinn Féin became the largest party for the first time. In 2024 Michelle O’Neill became Northern Ireland’s first nationalist First Minister.

The symbolism was enormous.

But symbolism is not the same thing as a referendum result.

A vote for Sinn Féin is not automatically a vote for Irish unity, just as religious background cannot automatically predict how someone would vote in a border poll. Northern Ireland contains a growing number of people who do not fit comfortably within the traditional nationalist and unionist categories at all.

Then there is Brexit.

The Republic of Ireland remains a member of the European Union. The United Kingdom does not.

Northern Ireland therefore occupies a unique geographical and political position: it is part of the United Kingdom, shares a land border with an EU member state and exists under arrangements specifically designed to prevent the reappearance of a hard border on the island.

Brexit did not create the question of Irish unity. That question is centuries older.

But Brexit placed the border back into political conversation in a way that many people had hoped was no longer necessary.

Against that background, Donald Trump’s remarks landed in September 2026.

Standing beside Taoiseach Micheál Martin, the Irish Prime Minister, Trump said that he would love to see Ireland unified. He suggested that it would happen eventually and later said that it may as well happen now. He subsequently described the idea as something that would be pretty cool.

This was not diplomatic language.

The British Government promptly restated its position that there was presently no basis for calling a border poll. Unionist politicians reacted strongly. Irish political leaders were more cautious. Micheál Martin suggested that some of the reaction had been excessive while making clear that Irish government policy had not changed.

And somewhere amid all of this, I experienced the politically disorientating sensation of listening to Donald Trump and thinking:

Well. He has a point.

Not necessarily about the answer.

About the question.

Trump has a peculiar ability to remove every layer of diplomatic language from an issue and reduce it to something almost childishly direct.

There is one relatively small island.

Why are there two jurisdictions on it?

Why does one part use the euro and another sterling?

Why does one part belong to the European Union while another does not?

Why, more than a century after partition, does the division remain?

Those questions sound deceptively easy because they remove the people from the map.

Put the people back, and everything changes.

A United Ireland is not a cartographical exercise in deleting a line.

Northern Ireland contains a large community whose British identity is neither artificial nor temporary. For many unionists, membership of the United Kingdom is an integral part of personal, family and cultural identity. The Good Friday Agreement specifically protects that tradition.

Equally, there is a large community that regards the border itself as the historical anomaly. For many nationalists, Irish unity represents the completion of a political process interrupted by partition.

Between those positions are hundreds of thousands of people whose priorities may be far more practical.

What happens to healthcare?

What happens to taxation?

What happens to pensions?

What happens to the National Health Service?

What happens to Northern Ireland’s devolved institutions?

Would a new Ireland retain existing British cultural symbols and traditions?

What constitutional protections would be provided for unionists?

Would Ireland require an entirely new constitutional settlement rather than simply extending the existing Republic northwards?

What would reunification cost?

And perhaps the most important question of all: what exactly would people be voting for?

The Good Friday Agreement provides the mechanism by which constitutional change can happen. It does not provide a detailed blueprint for the state that would emerge afterwards.

That distinction may become increasingly important.

The phrase United Ireland can sound like a destination. In constitutional terms, it is closer to the beginning of a very large series of questions.

Perhaps that is why Trump’s intervention was so striking.

American presidents have historically played an important role in the Northern Ireland peace process, but they have generally spoken about it with extraordinary diplomatic caution. The United States helped facilitate the political environment in which the Good Friday Agreement became possible. Successive American administrations have treated that Agreement as something to be protected carefully.

Trump approached the issue differently.

There was no lengthy historical qualification.

No discussion of competing identities.

No constitutional seminar.

He simply looked at an island divided between two states and wondered aloud why it should remain that way.

The lawyer in me immediately produced the qualifications.

The Irish citizen in me understood the history.

The European in me thought about Brexit.

And the Hungarian in me, perhaps, recognised something familiar in the way borders drawn by history can continue to live inside national consciousness generations after the people who drew them have disappeared.

None of that provides an answer.

Nor should it.

The genius of the Good Friday Agreement was precisely that it removed the need to produce an immediate answer.

Northern Ireland can remain British for as long as its people choose to remain British. It can become part of a United Ireland if its people democratically choose that instead.

Both propositions can legally exist at the same time.

That carefully constructed ambiguity has helped sustain peace for almost three decades.

Whether the constitutional balance is beginning to change is a different question, and one that ultimately belongs not to Donald Trump, not to the British Government and not even to the Irish Government, but to the people whose consent the Agreement requires.

Trump’s intervention did not alter the law.

It did not trigger a referendum.

It did not resolve the economic, cultural or constitutional questions surrounding reunification.

What it did was something much simpler.

It asked the question out loud.

And on one completely unexpected day in September 2026, I found myself listening to Donald Trump talk about Ireland and, to my considerable surprise, not immediately disagreeing.

I am still recovering.

Cover photo: Petra Polonkai

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