The obvious answer to the question in the headline is that both are wealthy and both have been elected to the leading political position in one of the world’s most powerful English-speaking nations. Further, both Trump and Sunak have degrees from American universities; in the first instance, a bachelor’s from Penn, and in the second, a master’s from Stanford.
But there is more.
Using the newly created North Scale of Immigrant Relatedness, we find that each of them scores three points on it, while Joe Biden, for example, gets zero points. In this scoring system, one gets a point for each immigrant parent and another point for each immigrant spouse.
Both of the new prime minister’s parents were born in Kenya (to people of Indian stock), while his wife, Akshata Murthy, was born in India, for a total of three points. She is the very rich daughter of the founder of the huge Indian body shop Infosys, which, among other things, hires large numbers of H-1B tech workers.
In the case of Trump, he gets one point for his (rarely mentioned) mother, who was born on the wind-blown Scottish island of Lewis and Harris (perhaps the only island in the world with two names), while his two immigrant spouses were born in what was then Czechoslovakia (now Czechia) and in what was then Yugoslavia (now Slovenia). Again, a Trump total of three points.
Most American presidents, like Biden, have zero scores, with the exception of Barrack Obama who gets a single point for his father, another Kenyan, but an African, not an Indian.
Mystery. Speaking of immigration status, both Mr. and Mrs. Sunak, who met at Stanford, held, for an unknown number of years, American green cards. This brings up (as we noted earlier) the interesting question of whether Mrs. Sunak paid federal income taxes for the years that she held a green card. One in that status has an obligation to pay U.S. income taxes for one’s world-wide income; the British press sometimes reports that she is richer than that country’s monarch.
The question has some significance because for years she paid minimal taxes to the UK government while her husband was that nation’s head tax collector; she was reported some months ago as saying that she would no longer claim non-domicile status, and would start paying the UK what she owed.
Her husband has said he met his American tax obligations, but what about hers? IRS is unlikely to raid 10 Downing Street, but why have we heard nothing about this in either the UK or the U.S. press?