Red ink on greens at Trump’s Scotland courses

The Trump Organization’s two Scottish golf courses lost $14.3 million in 2018, extending a multiyear string of losses that have intensified since Donald Trump took office, according to annual financial reports released this month.

The results add further pressure to two of President Trump’s key overseas investments at a time when the company faces backlashes on many fronts, including customers who shun the president’s family business for political reasons and golf course neighbors upset by the company’s plans to build hundreds of new homes on bucolic farmland.

The losses at the two Scotland courses, the Turnberry resort along the southwestern coast and another seaside course near Aberdeen in the northeast, were detailed in documents filed by the Trump Organization with the British government and posted online recently.

These two courses are among 14 properties Trump bought without loans between 2006 and 2014, an all-cash spending binge that topped $400 million.

Turnberry is the larger and more famous of the two courses. Trump bought the historic links course — the site of four British Opens — in 2014 and has spent more than $200 million to buy and renovate the property and sustain its losses.

In its filing, the Trump Organization touted Turnberry’s “tremendous success” in the company’s fifth full year operating the resort. The company said revenue in 2018, $22.5 million, was higher than any year in the course’s history. But the company also lost $13 million for the year. Turnberry has not turned a profit since Trump has owned it.