Tears, tantrums and Trump's love affair with his mother's Scotland
It is his ‘magical’ place where he was once feted and honoured by politicians. But the President’s special relationship with Scotland is now riven by hatred, hostility and bitterness
IT was on a balmy spring evening in New York’s Upper West Side in 2006 that Donald Trump first took a giddy Scotland’s hand in his. Jack McConnell was there; so was SNP leader Alex Salmond, who was soon to succeed him as First Minister.
Sir Sean Connery, back in circulation following a kidney operation, looked worryingly suggestible by the billionaire’s side. Catching Mr Trump’s eye on the catwalk at the Dressed to Kilt fashion show was Miss Scotland Aisling Friel in a stunning ivory and red tartan creation. Then came the contrasting spectacle of Mr Salmond stomping down the same gangway in a kilt and cowboy hat.
Scotland had possibly had one too many that night. When it woke up in the morning, Sir Sean had been offered honorary membership of a Trump golf course in Aberdeenshire yet to be given planning permission. The same sweetener, it is understood, was offered to Mr McConnell.
Back home in Scotland, the First Minister showed Mr Trump some more leg. He announced he would join the GlobalScot network of influential people with Scottish roots whose expertise could help promote the country. Indeed, Mr McConnell wanted ‘platinum member’ status of the club for Mr Trump – to reflect the fact he was a much bigger deal than anyone else in it.
‘This is a good bit of business for all concerned,’ said Mr McConnell, missing the fact he was implying support for a major development which had yet to be approved. Never mind, his equally ardent successor would make the same mistake.
Twelve years on, Scotland may shudder at the starry-eyed naivety with which it swooned at the first flicker of interest from a tycoon notorious for messy break-ups, both in his professional and personal affairs.
Our political elite may now affect incredulity at anyone who fails to see him as a bully, a bigot, a womaniser and entirely unfit for high office. But the fact remains. The US President, who will be holed up this evening in his Turnberry resort on the Ayrshire coast as thousands of protesters across the nation scream their abhorrence of him, once had Scotland falling at his feet.
Not so very long ago, the grievances of David Milne – who Mr Trump wanted to turf out of his ‘ugly’ house so he could raze it to the ground – were those of a dissenting voice in the wilderness. So, too, were those of his Aberdeenshire neighbour Michael Forbes, who Mr Trump accused of living like a pig.
‘The people love what we’re doing here,’ the future president used to say of his golf project on the Menie Estate near Balmedie. Mr Salmond, as constituency MSP for the area, did not demur.
‘They love that I’m spending hundreds of millions of pounds on doing it,’ said Mr Trump. It indeed appeared a huge selling point to many in the area.
‘They love the fact that I’m creating a lot of jobs for the area and for Scotland,’ he declared. To an extent, he was right again.
ABERDEENSHIRE councillors certainly loved the Trump proposals enough to sack Martin Ford, the committee chairman who used his casting vote to block the golf resort application.
Mr Salmond was impressed enough with what Mr Trump was doing in his constituency to meet two of his representatives at an upmarket Aberdeen hotel.
A day later, the government Mr Salmond led called in the golf resort planning application, taking it out of the hands of the Aberdeenshire Council committee which had rejected it. Not that Mr Salmond was officially responsible for that decision.
No, it was made by his finance minister John Swinney, who, days earlier, had enjoyed a visit to Mr Trump’s Westchester Country Club in New York State. Mr Swinney denied the visit had any influence on his thinking.
Perhaps not – but it is easy to forget, amid all the SNP virtue signalling over this most ‘toxic’ of world leaders, the extent to which the Scottish Government was once in thrall to Mr Trump and his billions. While condemnation of ‘inhumane’ Trump policies may trip off the tongue today, the chorus of disapproval was rather more muted among Scottish politicians as the property magnate cut up rough in their back yards.
Where were the politicians, for example, when he was seeking compulsory purchase orders to remove several families from the homes they had lived in for decades so his rich golfing customers would not have to look at them?
Where were they when Mr Trump authorised a sinister precursor of his Mexican wall policy? He instructed staff to build a fence around Mr Milne’s home, a former Coastguard station – then sent him the bill.
Why no political outcry when the tycoon had huge mounds of earth piled up outside the homes of those who refused to sell up, blocking their outlooks?
It was almost as if the word had gone round to keep the moneybags investor sweet.
Mr Milne says now: ‘There was a silence from the great and the good about what was going on. If they said anything, it was positive.’
Yet he says the behaviour of Mr Trump at Menie was simply a miniature version of his presidency. ‘It’s the same tricks, you see, the same bulls***, the lies, the threatening, the belittling is all exactly the same thing, just on a larger scale.’ Not until 2010, when Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University conferred an honorary doctorate on the New Yorker, did the tide begin to turn. In protest, the university’s former principal Dr David Kennedy handed back his honorary degree, declaring he was ‘shocked and appalled’ at the institution’s poor judgment.
‘Mr Trump is simply not a suitable person to be given an honorary degree and he should not be held up as an example of how to conduct business,’ said Dr Kennedy.
‘Mr Trump’s behaviour in NorthEast Scotland has been deplorable from the first, particularly in how he has treated his neighbours.’
Not that SNP politicians were echoing the respected academic’s sentiments.
It was not until a year after that the Trump/SNP love-in finally turned sour. Ironically, that dispute won Mr Trump some sympathisers.
He claimed he had been assured, first by Mr McConnell and later by Mr Salmond, that his Aberdeenshire golf project had nothing to fear from offshore wind farms – a deal-breaker for the American who considered the turbines monstrosities.
Having invested substantially in the area, he learned that plans for a £200million experimental wind farm with 640ft turbines a mile offshore from his golf course had been submitted for approval by Swedish firm Vattenfall. Would Mr Salmond make them go away?
Unfortunately for the tycoon, Mr Salmond was now as in thrall to wind power as he had once been to him.
WARFARE swiftly ensued. Soon, Mr Trump was telling anyone who would listen that the First Minister and his predecessor – not he – were the seducers. ‘They lured me in,’ he said. ‘I spent this money and now I might regret it.’
Unlike many of Mr Trump’s inflated claims, this one had the air of credibility. So, it was over wind farms – not humanitarianism – that the wheels came off the Scottish Government’s relationship with Donald Trump.
Laying the blame at the politicians’ door, he abandoned plans for the 450-bedroom hotel and the 1,450 private and holiday homes which would have accounted for so many of the jobs promised for the resort – and instead delivered just
a golf course and a club house. Many suspected he would soon lose interest and sell – and, to teach the SNP a lesson, divert his largesse to Ireland. The Trump bluster about Scotland being special because his mother, Mary MacLeod, grew up on Lewis was surely just a PR line and, any time now, he would be gone. But he never left. Indeed, it is telling that the US President continues to consider his golf course in Aberdeenshire not just the finest in his portfolio but also ‘the best anywhere in the world’. Why not accord the superlatives to a project where he got his way, which is complete and making money rather than the vexed Scottish development which, ultimately, failed to deliver on its promises and now has a wind farm a mile offshore?
The answer is Scotland is different. While there are brief perfunctory visits to Mr Trump’s other properties around the world, nowhere outside of the United States has received the personal attention the Trump International Golf Links Scotland did. Something more than money drives his interest in Scotland?
His love of golf and appreciation of the fact that Scotland is the home of the game is certainly a factor.
But his love for his late mother, who, in his advancing years, he now increasingly resembles, was perhaps a greater motivator than many imagined. In the absence of a huge hotel at Menie, the estate lodge has been turned into a boutique one. Significantly, it has been renamed MacLeod House.
He has visited the humble Hebridean cottage in which his mother grew up and, surprisingly perhaps, was fascinated by her native Gaelic tongue.
When she was still alive, Mr Trump enjoyed telling the story of the time his mother, then 79, was mugged, suffering broken ribs and severe facial bruising and losing $14 from her purse. When she woke up in hospital, medical staff could not establish her identity – and she could not help, for she seemed to be talking gibberish. It was not until an Irish-born nurse heard her ravings and recognised a few words that the penny dropped. Mary MacLeod had lapsed back into her mother tongue.
That her son gravitates increasingly to the land of her birth is unquestionable. In 2014, having failed to secure a development opportunity overlooking the Old Course in St Andrews, he threw yet more of his fortune Scotland’s way, investing £36million in the hotel and golf courses at Turnberry.
Just as Scotland was blowing increasingly cool on Mr Trump, his passion for the place was now clear for all to see. Only the small matter of running for president stood in the way of many more visits to his Scottish properties.
But, of course, it was his presidential ambitions and the expression of beyond-the-pale views on everything from gun control to immigration which proved fatal for his relationship with Scotland.
By the time of his last visit to Turnberry two years ago, Nicola Sturgeon had already stripped him of his GlobalScot ambassador role over his call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States. Bowing to overwhelming pressure, Robert Gordon University had also revoked his honorary degree.
HUMILIATED, Mr Trump hit back in characteristic style: ‘I have done so much for Scotland, including building Trump International Golf Links, Scotland. Additionally, I have made a significant investment in the redevelopment of the iconic Turnberry.
‘If they – Nicola Sturgeon and RGU – were going to do this, they should have informed me prior to my major investment in this £200million development, which will totally revitalise that vast region of Scotland.
‘The UK politicians should be thanking me instead of pandering to political correctness. I only said what needed to be said.’
The intervening period has done nothing to pacify his mother’s countryfolk. From the sex allegations to family separation in US immigration enforcement, almost every facet of his presidency has been met by a chorus of disapproval from the party once desperate to have him invest in Scotland – and from much of the nation.
How remarkable, then, that on his first visit to the UK as President of the United States, he spends only hours south of the Border – and days in the land which has caused him no end of trouble.
It can only be love.