Even the windmill stuff, it’s fucking great. Every day there’s a story about Trump.
—DONALD TRUMP ON HIS BATTLES WITH SCOTTISH OFFICIALS
Susan Munro spread birdseed on the patio outside her kitchen window, then scattered some kibble in the grass for the shy hedgehog that sometimes nosed around her garden. She was glad that the fox that once raised a litter of kits in a den on the north side of her cottage had moved on. A clever fox will push a hedgehog onto its back, and, well, it was better not to imagine such things.
Well into her fifties, Munro’s blond hair was turning gray. Her face was weathered and creased, and she spoke with a tobacco rasp. But her health was good and she felt content. Munro had been born and raised in the nearby city of Aberdeen. But for decades her life had been here, at the house called Leyton Cottage. It stood at the end of a rutted dirt road. To the east lay only towering sand dunes and the sea. In every other direction stretched the vast Menie Estate, which was owned by a gentleman farmer from America named Tom Griffin. With the exception of the occasional shots fired by hunters who paid him to shoot at pheasant and partridge on the estate, Griffin was a quiet neighbor.
The isolation at Leyton Cottage was so complete that Susan Munro could recall every visitor to her door, but she would have remembered Peter Whyte even if she’d lived in the city. It’s not every day that a stranger turns up to say he wants to buy your house. As she recalled it, he said, “I was here on holiday and walking along the beach. I saw your house and just had to ask if it might be available.”
Paunchy, with a smooth face, blue eyes, and wavy hair in rapid retreat, Whyte spoke with a posh-school accent. Perhaps, thought Munro, he was just another victim of the real estate fever that was burning across the United Kingdom. In five years, the median price of a British home had roughly doubled. Many owners had turned their paper gains into cash by taking out new mortgages. Much of this money had been invested in more property, but if you didn’t have cash, you could apply for a new type of mortgage that covered 100 percent of a purchase. Everyone was talking about real estate, and it seemed as if only the most cautious—some would say slow-witted—stayed out of the game.
Peter Whyte had the look of someone who was winning the game. But if he truly hoped to turn a profit, thought Munro, why bother with the most humble house around? Yes, it was close to the sea, but the dunes, some of which were forty feet high, made the path to it daunting. And the house itself was much too modest for this fellow. Why wouldn’t he go for David and Moira Milne’s place on the bluff, or Sheila and Michael Forbes’s farm with its many acres? Munro didn’t ask any of the questions that came to her mind. Instead she made mental notes to give her husband, John, an accurate report when he got home from work.
As Whyte departed, Munro thought, “You can’t see this house from the beach. I wonder what he really wants.” In the evening, the Munros agreed that their property wasn’t an asset to be sold, traded, or mortgaged.
Had they not preferred to keep things private, the people who lived in the homes scattered across the Menie Estate would have known sooner that Peter Whyte had knocked on every one of their doors. David Milne had been watching a rugby match on TV. Annoyed by the intrusion, he sent Whyte away. Sheila Forbes, a brassy woman inclined to speak her mind, told Whyte, “Fuck off,” and refused to even talk to him.
When the Menie neighbors finally spoke to each other about Peter Whyte, they became suspicious. A call to Whyte’s phone was answered by someone who announced, “Hobday Golf.” The proprietor’s full name was Neil Peter Whyte Hobday. When he came on the line, Hobday confessed that he was not a holiday visitor eager to buy a vacation home. He was, instead, a consultant to a real estate developer who had big plans for the windswept stretch of Scottish coastline where the Munros, Milneses, Forbeses, and other neighbors lived in contented isolation. Tom Griffin had already agreed to sell his Menie Estate, all eight hundred acres, and a big golf resort was being planned.
The truth about Peter Whyte spread as neighbors stopped on narrow farm roads to trade information from car to car. As spring arrived, the development became a topic of conversation at the local convenience store and at the café/gallery called Tarts and Crafts. Finally the local press announced that an American named Donald Trump planned to build five hundred houses and nearly a thousand apartments near the fairways of two golf courses. A 450-room hotel was also in the offing, with the usual restaurants and meeting rooms. The golf links would require a sprawling clubhouse—of Disney/neo-Victorian design—and then there would be the roads and parking lots and housing for four hundred staff. The development would also chew up some of the dunes, which had supposedly been set off-limits as an environmentally sensitive Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).1
* * *
Trump arrived in Aberdeen on the last Saturday in April 2006, landing at the airport in his Boeing 727. Descending from the plane to the strains of “Highland Laddie” played by a bagpiper, he was met at the airport by a bigger crowd than normally greeted the queen when she visited nearby Balmoral Castle. Boosters had already begun to promote Trump and his promised investment. The members of one organization, called the Economic Forum, had even declared that the development represented the biggest boon to Scotland since the rise of the oil industry. True to his germophobic form, Trump said, “I should almost kiss the earth,” because he had arrived in his mother’s homeland.
The American billionaire’s visit to Aberdeen and the Menie Estate resembled a modern political campaign swing. Outfitted in an expensive suit and distinguished by his glowing hair, Trump’s presence commanded attention even if he was merely walking to a waiting car. Trailed by aides and reporters, he was transported in a motorcade to a whirlwind of meetings and receptions attended by local bigwigs. Journalists filmed and photographed his every move and recorded what he said about the good his money would accomplish for the people of Scotland. The Aberdeen papers jumped on the bandwagon. One, the Evening Express, reached an immediate conclusion on the plan, telling readers, “It is crucial we embrace” Trump’s project.2
As they viewed Trump on their televisions and read about him in the paper, the denizens of Menie Estate thought that their predicament seemed like something out of a movie. Then they realized that they had actually seen the movie in 1983.
In Local Hero, a stranger suddenly appears and tries to buy a swath of the Scottish coast on behalf of a wealthy American with a secret plan. Greed prevails and the locals scheme for windfall profits on their land until an eccentric holdout stops everything. In some ways the film foreshadowed events here in Balmedie village with uncanny accuracy, even providing a role model for those who would be heroes. In the movie, the American was a Texan named Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster), who changed his plan to accommodate the Scots. In real life, the American was a New Yorker named Donald Trump. He had already cultivated Scottish politicians in hopes of speeding his project to approval, and he didn’t seem to be interested in accommodating anyone.
Donald Trump had acted as if the development game in Scotland were essentially the same as the one played in America, except for the occasional pipers in kilts. Big projects invariably run up against zoning and environmental regulations, which are the purview of elected officials. As politicians, elected officials were generally concerned with making voters happy so they could stay in office. The happiness of the voters required good jobs, good public services, low taxes, and the feeling that the future was bright. In Scotland, a shrinking population and declining revenues from North Sea oil wells shadowed the future, and First Minister Jack McConnell was eagerly seeking investments to reverse the trends. He believed that tourism and wind energy were especially prime for growth. Trump wasn’t in the energy business, but he knew how to build a golf resort that might draw tourists to the windswept eastern coast of the country.3
McConnell and Trump had both attended the “Dressed to Kilt” fashion show in Manhattan in April 2005. The annual event brought prominent Americans of Scottish ancestry together with Scottish officials. By summer, officials of a Scottish-government economic-development agency were courting Trump in hopes he would invest in something they code-named Project X. In October, after Trump signaled he was ready to proceed, McConnell jetted back to New York for a private lunch and consultations at Trump Tower. (The first minister had been on a bit of an international spree, traveling around the world hoping to lure business investment.) The Scottish public was told that the meeting was intended as an opportunity to “discuss Trump’s interest in and connection with Scotland.” In McConnell’s inner circle, however, it was acknowledged that he went “to discuss Mr. Trump’s proposal for entry into the UK golf resort market via a project in Aberdeenshire.”
A day after the Trump Tower meeting, the Scottish press reported only the cover story. Trump was quoted saying it was “possible” he would invest in Scotland and was pleased because his mother was from the Hebrides, which is “serious Scotland.” McConnell said only that “one of the most successful businessmen in the world” was interested in his country. Privately, a Scottish development official wrote to a Trump aide to say, “I hope you were reassured at the highest level possible through both Jack McConnell, Scotland’s First Minister, and Jack Perry, our CEO’s involvement in today’s meeting, that we are committed to the partnership that will deliver this project.” Trump was also assured he had “a direct line into the government in Scotland.”
In January 2006, Scottish officials met privately in Aberdeen with architects whom Trump had hired as he began to assemble land for his development. They agreed that the project he wanted to build might conflict with land-use plans and recognized that a proposal for development on the dunes might prompt opposition by environmental groups. But they also wanted to see the project built, and toward this end they set a strict timetable for pushing it through the local council so that Trump could start building as soon as possible. The government officials also noted that in the event that the council refused to grant Trump permission, Jack McConnell’s national government could overrule the locals. This type of intervention was rare and could only be accomplished after a formal public process. But if they wanted Trump’s investment, and the locals wouldn’t yield, they could force it on them.
The power move would be a last resort. How would it look if the government pushed people out of their homes so that rich golfers could hack around the dunes? McConnell’s government preferred that the public embrace Trump as a benefactor bearing a huge bank account, and not a developer intent on spoiling the countryside. Unfortunately this hope depended on a man who often seemed like a walking caricature of greedy self-interest. The suits. The hair. The big airplane painted with his name in huge, gold letters. It may have worked for him on his TV show, but for some in Scotland it reeked of flimflam. McConnell could do little to counteract this image. Getting too close to Trump in public might hurt him with voters. So, from a distance, McConnell announced that Trump had been named a “Global Scot.”
The title—Global Scot—rang with a certain majesty. It suggested power, status, and even official privileges. In fact, it was more like an invitation to join a booster club, and not a very old one at that. Created in 2001, the Global Scot network was run by a government economic-development agency. Members were encouraged to attend lectures and social gatherings and perhaps do some business. Did this program actually make a difference for Scotland? It would be almost impossible to answer this question. But it did add a fillip to an executive’s biography—“He’s a Global Scot”—that might be helpful were he ever introduced to a crowd in, say, Aberdeen.4
* * *
For a rich man who was mad for golf, the prospect of building a course in the country where the game was invented was tantalizing. Trump had already developed successful high-end golf resorts with housing in the United States, including one in Westchester County, New York, and another in Palos Verdes, California. But in Scotland, a country already endowed with many of the best courses in the world, he would need to offer something special to attract golfers who could pay the high greens fee—up to $300 per person—necessary to support a first-rate development. Something special existed in the links land in Balmedie. This had been obvious even to Tom Griffin, who had never played the game.
Griffin had considered building a course himself, but some problems had stopped him. For one thing, Aberdeen’s cold, wet weather would limit play. (Even in the summertime highs average just shy of sixty-five degrees.) Then there was the legal status of the dunes. The government had designated them an SSSI because they provided natural habitat for wildlife and plants. Also, the dunes were unusual geological formations. The tides and winds moved them at a rate of several meters per year. The Menie Sand Sheet, as it was called, was one of the most impressive examples of a dynamic dune system in all of Britain. In the fifteenth century a gale that blew across the sands for nine days buried all of a nearby village except for the spire of a church.
The breezes that had shifted the sands for millennia had also made the waters offshore attractive to energy experts, who imagined windmills anchored to the seabed and power lines delivering electricity to the shore. This vision had been embraced by national leaders, who hoped that as North Sea petroleum ran out, wind power would become a new valuable commodity. Wind-power stations would be supported by engineers and industries already located in Aberdeen to serve the offshore drilling platforms. Talk of Scottish-built turbines and electricity exported to the European mainland soothed fears of post-oil job losses. But as Trump promised his own version of economic development—roughly $1.5 billion in construction, six thousand temporary jobs, and twelve hundred permanent ones—he repeatedly told Scottish officials that he didn’t want his golfers to see offshore windmills. He would eventually report they had assured him this wouldn’t happen.5
As he negotiated with politicians in private, Donald publicly proclaimed his love for Scotland. In Aberdeen he cited his mother’s Scottish birth to show he was sentimental about the place and meant no harm. Unfortunately, he sometimes said she was not “Scottish” but rather “Scotch,” which many locals considered a pejorative except when it was applied to whiskey or eggs. But slips of language were forgiven by those who saw the benefits of a resort that might attract the golf pilgrims who trek to Scotland to test themselves at ancient courses. Among the supporters were the officials of local business groups and journalists at the local papers, the Express and the Press and Journal, who greeted Trump and his project with great enthusiasm.
With a population of 5.2 million, which was less than that of New York City, Scotland didn’t see many private investments of $1.5 billion, which explained the support Trump received from many in Aberdeen. However, he recognized the obstacles in his way. A Trump aide told the local press that the golf development would be canceled “if people want to ruin Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire [with windmills].” Trump demanded quick action to resolve land-use issues, saying, “Either this will happen very quickly or it won’t happen at all.” And he made sure to tie First Minister McConnell to the project, speaking of him as if he were a partner, if not the instigater of the whole project. McConnell had contacted him “many times,” said Trump. “He was fantastic and did a great job in persuading us.”6
Although Trump talked of him as an ally, the first minister’s actual constituents included the people who lived at Menie and had turned away Neil Peter Whyte Hobday. Some of the residents suspected that McConnell had violated a code of conduct that barred him from doing anything that “might be seen as prejudicial” when it came to development proposals. Of course conflict over the Trump plan would be eased if he could buy out his neighbors, so when his representatives failed to persuade the holdouts, Trump went to Menie to see what he might accomplish himself.
Tom Griffin played go-between, hosting some of his neighbors and Trump at his home. The Griffin house had been built in 1835 atop a much older foundation. Made of gray stone and decorated with a circular tower, Menie House resembled a small castle and would become a hotel when Trump took over. A few neighbors showed up to discuss the planned development, but Michael Forbes was not among them. Griffin went down the farm road to talk to him and found Forbes in his yard, mending the nets he used to catch salmon off the beach. The Forbes family had controlled the rights to this catch for generations.
“He came up and said, ‘Do you want to meet Donald Trump?’” recalled Forbes years later. “I said, ‘Nae really.’ Tom told me the fella wanted to talk to the locals, and I said that if he wanted to speak to me, he knows where I am.”
Forbes was a granite block of a man, short, broad-chested, and stubbornly set in his ways. Nestled between the dunes and out of his neighbors’ view, his property was very much a working farm, with hay fields and sheds, goats, fowl, and a horse. Broken machines were left where they died, to supply spare parts for those that worked. This was a matter of practicality, and since none of his neighbors could even see his property, Forbes considered his way of managing things to be no one’s business. Indeed, he had purchased his land for the sole purpose of living as he pleased. He had even moved his mother to the property. Her cottage, which sat across the one-lane road from the main house, was decorated with a small sign that read PARADISE.
Although Griffin liked Forbes well enough, he considered him stubborn and emotional and not the kind of man who would go along with Trump’s plans. Nevertheless he went back to Menie House to fetch Trump, and the famous golf architect Tom Fazio, who had come to inspect the land. The group found Forbes still in his yard. As Forbes would recall, Trump tried to engage in a little small talk. It didn’t go well.
“Trump said to me, ‘What’s this land worth, about twenty dollars an acre?’
“I said, ‘Ach, in yer dreams.’
“Then he said to me, ‘We’re here to build a golf course and we’re going to do it.’ He turned to Tom Fazio and said, ‘You deal with this man. Tell him we’ll give him a job for life.’”
A designer, not a developer, Fazio was not the man to negotiate a land purchase, and he did not try to talk terms. Forbes would remember telling Fazio about the salmon concession he had inherited, which controlled the fishing off the beach, and his own plans for the property. He had a grown son and two grandsons and he expected them to inherit the place. With them in mind, he couldn’t imagine selling at any price. Fazio wouldn’t try to talk him into it. In fact he would leave the project and let another prominent designer, Martin Hawtree, take the commission.
Forbes was not the only holdout. Several property owners, including the Munros and the Milnes, also refused to sell under any terms. Tom Griffin, who had known each of them for about twenty years, wasn’t surprised. The Milnes had poured their life savings and thousands of hours in labor into converting a bluff-top former coast-guard station into a home with incomparable views of the sea. After raising a family there, the Munros were emotionally attached to their place and also imagined leaving it for future generations, who could wander the dunes and play on the beach.7
* * *
If some of his neighbors seemed to Griffin like immovable objects, he considered Trump a comparably irresistible force. In his own negotiations with the man, Griffin had noticed that Trump was relentless about getting what he wanted. For example, before making his final payment, Trump noted that a big electrical generator and several big blocks of stone, used to repair the house, had been left on the property. He demanded that Griffin have them trucked away or accept a reduced payment. In America at the time, Griffin considered the expense that would be required to satisfy Trump and gave in. “He beat me out of about thirty thousand or forty thousand dollars,” Griffin would recall. “You might think it was a small amount for someone like him, but you could also think that he made himself tens of thousands of dollars just by making a demand most people wouldn’t make.” (According to published accounts, Trump paid Griffin about 6.7 million British pounds, or roughly $11.3 million, depending on the exchange rate.)
Griffin would also remember a dinner with Trump at a place called the Cock & Bull, which overlooked the Menie Estate from a spot along a highway called the A90. Throughout the meal Griffin felt as if he were dining with an actor playing a part. “It was Donald Trump, playing Donald Trump.” When “the waitress came up with the bill,” said Griffin, “Donald said to her, ‘Usually, I get comped in these situations.’” Griffin supposed that Trump meant that businesspeople gave him freebies wherever he proposed to invest heavily in the local economy. “She went to talk to the manager, who said he would agree if Trump would pose for a picture with the staff.” The staff filed out. Trump posed. The dinner was free.
Although he didn’t always convert his fame to favors in such a direct and obvious way, Trump was accustomed to getting what he wanted. Concerned that the Forbes farm and other houses would ruin the vistas for golfers, he dispatched his son Donald Jr. and a Trump Organization executive, George Sorial, to make further offers. Both men dressed in expensive clothes and wore their dark hair slicked back, which reminded the recalcitrant Scots of New York mobsters. “At one point Sorial handed me a piece of paper and said, ‘Have a look at this,’” said Forbes. On the paper was written an offer of ₤350,000. Forbes added that when he declined the offer, “Sorial said, ‘We’ll come back with more.’ I said, ‘No, you won’t, because this is the last of it.’”8
Sorial would travel back and forth to Scotland more than a dozen times as he worked on the golf development. A lawyer by training, Sorial, like most Trump executives, wore a variety of hats. In 2007 he had been identified in The Wall Street Journal as managing director of Trump International Golf Resorts. Sorial lived in a Trump building, where he was on the board of apartment owners, and considered his position with Trump a kind of dream job. He confessed that like his boss he had been a somewhat unruly kid who was straightened out at an all-male school—in his case a Catholic school run by Benedictine monks, which he attended from 1982 to 1986. Sorial had ties to Scotland and the Isle of Lewis, where he had spent many summers of his childhood visiting relatives.
As Trump and his associates tried to buy up properties, they also developed a proposal for Scottish authorities, who would have to approve the development because it deviated from existing land-use plans. At the local level, they would have to deal with committees of the Aberdeenshire Council and then the entire council itself. The key committee was headed by Martin Ford, who in style, purpose, and personality couldn’t have been more different from Donald Trump.
Born and raised in the countryside of southwest England, Ford came from a family of stubborn idealists. During World War I his grandfather was one of very few conscientious objectors whose status was confirmed by government authorities. He spent the war years helping farmers produce food for the troops. Ford held a doctorate in plant ecology and, prior to his election to the council in 1999, had been a professor at the Scottish Agricultural College. Thirteen years younger than Trump, Ford was an angular, athletic-looking man with blue eyes and gray, curly hair. Although he lived in the countryside, he was so committed to environmental protection that he rode a bicycle, in all weather, sometimes logging fifty miles in a day as he served a rural district of ninety-five hundred scattered citizens. His wife, Gina, whom he had met at a conference of the Liberal Democrats, would say he was “an eccentric.” Ford would say he was a man of principles.
Among Ford’s principles was his commitment to the rules that governed his work as chairman of the committee that oversaw development in Aberdeenshire. He would conduct the hearings that took public comment on Trump’s proposal and would guide the committee through its review of reports from professional experts—planners, economists, scientists—who would consider the effect of the project on everything from traffic and the environment to the local economy. He was required to consider the merits of the application, and not the applicant. “What matters is the land and what’s being proposed for it,” he explained after dealing with the issue. “Where your mother was born isn’t a consideration. Highway traffic congestion is.” Ford never referred to Trump by name, calling him instead “the applicant.” He also turned away reporters who tried to get him to stake out a position on the golf development.9
As Ford proceeded with the review, more than thirty-five hundred people sent letters or signed petitions forwarded to the council. The ranks of those in favor exceeded those against by about one hundred and fifty names. Most of the letters, were the product of organized campaigns and made echoing arguments. Those in favor, encouraged by the Chamber of Commerce, welcomed the jobs and business activity that would come with the development. Those against, who were supported by a group called Sustainable Aberdeenshire, said Trump would not deliver what he had promised and that the environmental costs were too high. Further opposition also came from various preservation groups, including the Scottish Wildlife Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
As Trump’s people developed the documents necessary to apply for planning exceptions, editorial writers in the local papers tried to rally reader support for him. “Seize the day,” declared the Press and Journal. They also lampooned his opponents in cruel terms. In the eyes of the editorial writers they were “shiny-eyed saviors of a bit of sand” and “whinging, squabbling bairns [children] more worried about birds than people.” They were also “no-hopers” and “misfits” and “‘small-minded numpties [fools]” and “buffoons in woolly jumpers.” One of the papers even banished an antidevelopment group from its news pages, insisting it had no legitimate interest in the region. Members of the organization would never again be quoted by the Press and Journal.10
While the local press tilted toward Trump, journalists from outside Aberdeen began to arrive in pursuit of the story of the American billionaire intent on developing one of the last unspoiled places on the Scottish coast. Most made their way to the Menie Estate, where they found Michael and Sheila Forbes, Susie Munro, and David Milne. With each interview, Trump’s local opponents grew more outspoken. Michael Forbes, who had been so shy for most of his life that he hated casual conversations, quickly became a most quotable subject for interviewers, who couldn’t get enough of his thick brogue and chin-first attitude. “I wasn’t against the golf course from the start, but then they just went mental because I wouldn’t sell,” he told The Times of London in the fall of 2007. “They said they’d make my life a misery and they are.”
Forbes’s misery included a locked gate installed across the path that he and his ancestors had used for decades to access their fishing station. He complained of security men who followed him on farm roads and Trump executives who pestered him because they wouldn’t take no for an answer. When photographers asked, he obligingly dressed in his kilt or folded his tattooed arms across his chest as they clicked away. When she was interviewed, his eighty-three-year-old mother, Molly, said, “I came here to live in peace.”
Confronted with a stubborn man who was unmoved by his money, Trump responded in the style he often displayed when he was frustrated. He said Forbes’s farm was “disgusting” and wondered aloud whether he left machinery and supplies lying about “on purpose to try and make it look bad, so I have to pay some more money.” This kind of talk only won Forbes more admirers, especially among Scots, who saw in him, and his somewhat ramshackle property, reminders of a proud, rural past. Indeed, when he spoke of his farm as a “croft” Forbes sounded a cultural note that was unmistakable to anyone with a passing acquaintance with Scottish history.
In the local language a croft was the type of small family farm once found across the country. Although a few were owned by the people who worked them, most were occupied by tenants who paid rent or gave a share of their produce to a landlord. Between 1700 and 1900 thousands of crofters were forced off their lands in government-sanctioned “clearances” that forced farmers into villages, where they often suffered abject poverty. Crofters, who eventually won some protected status, became symbols of both English oppression and Scottish resilience. According to genealogists, Donald Trump’s ancestors were almost certainly driven off the land during a clearance on the Isle of Lewis. In Tong, where Trump’s mother had lived as a child, displaced croft families lived, according to one account, in “human wretchedness” alongside arable land that was set aside for game preserves. A century later, Trump seemed unaware that in his battle with Michael Forbes, he occupied the villain’s role in another attempt at the clearance of a croft.
By the time Martin Ford’s committee began to consider Trump’s application, few Scots were undecided. Michael Forbes and others who opposed the big development were likely favored by the majority of Scots. (To encourage their support Forbes had painted the words NO GOLF COURSE in giant red letters on the side of his barn.) But in Aberdeen, where any development’s benefits would be felt most directly, Trump enjoyed substantial backing. He could also count on Alex Salmond, who had replaced Jack McConnell as first minister, and Trump was supported by many on the shire council.
At the end of November 2007, Martin Ford and others on the committee debated Trump’s plan. As the public meeting wore on, the group seemed split right down the middle. Although the proposal was presented as an all-or-nothing proposition, projects were commonly rejected, revised, reconsidered, and approved. When the votes were tallied, Ford broke a tie and the plan was turned down. Trump didn’t get what he wanted, but many of the committee members expected him to try again with a modified plan. This was how things were done.11
After the vote, George Sorial angrily told the press, “If you want to do big business, don’t do it in the northeast of Scotland.” The front-page headline of the Aberdeen Evening Express screamed, YOU TRAITORS, next to photos of the councilors who opposed Trump. (The pictures had been photoshopped to make them look like turnips—neeps in common parlance—which was not a compliment.) At his home in the country Martin Ford’s phone rang with callers who shouted threats and curses. Police advised him and his wife to stay in their home behind locked doors. Councilor Debra Storr, who had voted against the Trump application, was assaulted physically on her doorstep by an angry citizen. Within days, lawyers for Trump were pressing local politicians, who were, in turn, talking about how to give him what he wanted, lest he take his money elsewhere. George Sorial demanded action within thirty days.
On the Monday after the committee vote, Alex Salmond huddled with Sorial and Neil Peter Whyte Hobday at an Aberdeen hotel called the Marcliffe. After this session, Salmond called Scotland’s chief planner, James Mackinnon. Sorial and Mackinnon met the following afternoon in Edinburgh. By the end of the day, Salmond’s national government would send the Aberdeenshire Council notice that it was taking over the process. Trump, who considered the committee vote to be “sad for Scotland, and certainly sad for Donald Trump,” would also declare, “We didn’t have anything to do” with the national government’s move. In the past, Edinburgh had stepped in to halt a development approved on the local level. But as far as Martin Ford could recall, this was the first time the government had intervened to advance a project that had been turned down by officials closest to the people who would be affected.
Having declared Martin Ford a traitor, the Evening Express campaigned for him to be removed from his chairmanship, arguing, among other points, that as a “non-driver” he was somehow unqualified to consider traffic issues. The sister paper of the Express, the Press and Journal, said Ford was “one step removed from eco-warrior status” and must therefore quit or be forced out. Ford resisted but soon found himself the subject of a raging debate among his colleagues. When they voted on a proposal to replace him as chairman, twenty-nine abstained, ten supported him, and twenty-six voted to remove him. Thus a minority managed to punish him by taking away his chairman’s post, which cut his $40,000-per-year salary by almost $20,000. Half-distressed and half-relieved, Ford would reflect on these events and decide he had been the victim of a level of hype and hyperbole so extreme that otherwise sober people he had known and collaborated with for many years had “gone mad” under the pressure from Trump and his allies in business, the press, and the government.12
With so much promised by Trump, Scottish national officials moved quickly. They announced they would convene public hearings at a convention center in Aberdeen and that Trump would be the first witness. On the day before he was to answer questions, Trump’s 727 set down at the only airport on his mother’s home island big enough to accommodate it. It was his first visit to his ancestors’ home since he was a child of three or four. His sister Maryanne, who accompanied him on this trip, had come many times before and after her mother’s death in 2000. As he stood on the tarmac, a gust of wind sent strands of his carefully constructed hair flying in different directions. Cases of his own books, including Trump: How to Get Rich and Trump: Never Give Up, were loaded into a Porsche Cayenne, the fanciest vehicle on the island, which had been borrowed for the day from a local millionaire.
Trump’s carefully plotted visit included a stop at his mother’s home in Tong, where one reporter noted he spent ninety-seven seconds inside. When he and his sister chatted with relatives, she charmed them with a few Gaelic phrases. He told them about his successes. Of The Apprentice, he said, “If you get ratings, you’re king, like me. I’m a king. If you don’t get ratings, you’re thrown off the air like a dog.” Of his career as a developer he told them, “They all want Trump because I do the highest level of work, and I’m known for that. People know that our level of work is the best, and when a project is finished, it’s going to be the best, and that’s why governments call me. They’ve a piece of land in a certain country, they call me.” The great majority of Trump’s business activity had been in the United States, but he was involved in projects in Canada, South Korea, Mexico, Dubai, and elsewhere. Some would come to fruition. Others would not.
In his three-hour visit, Trump also conducted a press conference, where he said he would consider funding the restoration of the island’s most important landmark, Lews Castle. Built in the nineteenth century by an opium trader, the castle had been given to the local people by the same Lord Leverhulme who had been unable to fulfill his promise of bringing jobs and prosperity to the island.13
After his brief visit, Trump departed Lewis to defend his promises of jobs and prosperity in Aberdeen. The next day he sat at a witness table to face the panel that would review his project. He dressed down for the appearance, choosing a sober, striped-blue tie instead of one of his usual power reds. In prepared remarks he said he intended to build “the best golf course in the world” and that could only be accomplished, at a profit, with the accompanying homes. “Without the funding from the construction of homes,” he added, “the economics are far below your acceptable return on investment.”
Later, in response to a question, Trump reverted to his off-the-cuff style, saying, “Let’s do it properly. Let’s not do it … half-assed.” He also insisted that a golf course, even one that would destroy some of the protected land, would be an improvement over the dunes, which might blow away in a storm. “When you walk on the site right now, it’s sort of disgusting. There are bird carcasses lying all over the place. There are dead animals all over the site that have been shot. There may be some people that are into that. I am not.” He later evoked the Khmer atrocities in Cambodia by describing the Menie Estate as “a killing field.”
Other witnesses, including government experts, supported Trump’s analysis, telling the panel that the resort and housing were, by far, the most valuable aspects of the development and could pump more than $1.5 billion into the region and produce fourteen hundred permanent jobs for people in northeast Scotland. The golf course would cost a comparative pittance—roughly $40 million—and would likely require fewer than one or two hundred workers, and many of them would enjoy only seasonal employment. Clearly, the big payoff for Scotland, as well as Trump, came with the sprawling vacation village he had envisioned. Here the local political controversy may have helped, as it attracted worldwide press attention. It was all free publicity.
When he returned to New York, Trump played up the drama of his Scottish endeavor when he appeared on David Letterman’s talk show. (With the birther bandwagon not yet rolling, he was introduced as “America’s favorite cutthroat billionaire.”) On TV Trump said he believed the Scottish authorities would give him permission to build as he wanted, but when quizzed on the location of the development, which was in the Scottish northeast, he sounded a bit less certain. Letterman asked if it was on the west coast of the country and Trump answered, “More or less.”
As officials considered overruling the local committee and giving Trump what he wanted, the British press was filled with reports that an economic recession was at hand. Lenders stopped making mortgage loans, and big banks turned to the taxpayers for bailouts. All the years of speculation were ending in misery for those who could not make payments on homes that were worth less each month. The biggest builder in the Aberdeen area laid off more than one hundred workers. Amid the gloom, Trump’s promises offered a bright spot of relief. In the fall, the Scottish government intervened to give him the permission he wanted, with some conditions covering, for the most part, the way the land was to be carved to accommodate fairways, greens, and tees. Trump expressed gratitude and then asked that the government consider forcing the holdouts to sell to him.14
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According to a letter that came to light after the fact, the idea that the government could seize Michael Forbes’s croft, and the homes owned by the Milnes and the Munros, was first raised by George Sorial and Neil Hobday. In February 2009 one of Trump’s lawyers, Ann Faulds, sent the Aberdeenshire Council a memo outlining the reasons that could be given for forcing the holdouts to relinquish their properties. A few weeks later she sent a formal request for the council to use its power of “compulsory purchase orders,” which would force the sale of the parcels to Trump. Faulds said that Trump could cover the cost of this effort, but would want, in exchange, “to retain control of the process.”
In requesting the government force people out of their homes, Trump gave his opponents the moral high ground. Michael Forbes went to the press with a catalog of complaints about local authorities helping Trump to bully Forbes off his property. First an inspector had come to determine whether Forbes was abusing his chickens, his geese, or his horse. They were all found in good condition. Next came an officer asking if Forbes possessed an illegal shotgun. He did not. Finally an official wanted to check out a rumor that Forbes was storing chemicals in an old tanker truck. He was not. All of this amounted to harassment, said Forbes, and all of it had happened before he learned that he might be forced to vacate his land. Forbes also reported that equipment operators on Trump’s property had broken the line delivering water to his house and repairs had taken ten days.15 During that time, his family had no water.
The threat of compulsory purchase seemed to energize opposition to the Trump project. In May 2009 homeowner David Milne showed up at a public event at which Neil Peter Whyte Hobday intended to show locals the plans for the development, where work was about to begin. Milne, who intended to share his views too, began speaking to people at the event. An incensed Hobday was caught by TV news cameras raising his voice to tell Milne, “This is not your show. Pick your own platform. Pay for it somewhere else. Invite the media and do it there. Just clear off.” Milne stood firm and got to say his piece, telling the people at the event, “If this is permitted to go ahead, no one in any home, anywhere in this country, will ever be safe again. That cannot be allowed. This is supposed to be a civilized country in the twenty-first century.” Ten days later Hobday resigned from the Trump project. He would land on his feet, eventually finding employment as the executive director of a posh, London-area polo club that had been founded by Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
After the confrontation at the Trump exhibit, an Internet group called Tripping Up Trump began a campaign against his project. More than seven thousand people joined a “landshare” scheme that divided approximately one acre of the Forbes farm into tiny plots, for which they received actual deeds. Theoretically, this action would require the authorities to issue compulsory purchase orders for every little slice of this tract, which the organizers hoped might discourage them from using this power. Councilor Martin Ford and others announced they opposed compulsory purchase, and it was never formally proposed.
Trump made public a letter in which he called Councilor Debra Storr “a national disgrace” for opposing his development plan. In September 2009 his son Donald Jr. and George Sorial went to the Forbes farm and attempted to negotiate with Forbes. Like his brother and sister, Donald Jr. was employed by the family business. He had held the title of executive vice president since joining the firm in 2001, at the age of twenty-four. His younger sister and brother held the same title. Although the three siblings had special areas of interest, no sharp lines separated them. Just as their father moved from project to project, focusing on TV in one moment and golf courses the next, they were expected to handle a variety of assignments, which would, presumably, expose them to the full range of the Trump empire.
When Donald Jr. and George Sorial met Michael Forbes, he had been infuriated by the threatened compulsory purchase order, and he greeted them with a torrent of verbal abuse. Trump Sr., who was offended by this incident, eventually replied in a venomous press release that stated, among other things, that Forbes “has always been dirty, sloppy and unkempt in his personal appearance and demeanor. He is a loser who is seriously damaging the image of both Aberdeenshire and his great country. His property is a disgusting blight on the community and an environmental hazard, with leaking oil containers, rusted shacks and abandoned vehicles dumped everywhere. It is a very poor image and representation for the world to see of Scotland.”
For years to come, Trump and Forbes would trade barbs. In the main, Trump talked about the condition of the Forbes croft, suggesting its owner was somehow unworthy of respect because his property was untidy. “My mother was born in Stornoway. She was so meticulous. The Scottish people are very clean people, and yet this guy runs the property like a slum. He lives in squalor.” He also complained that Forbes had agreed to sell, only to break his promise. Forbes insisted he would never sell: “There’s no truth to this at all. He is a compulsive liar. The last time his son came here, I chased him off the land. He’s got all these bodyguards with him, and if he keeps saying these things about me, then he will need them.”
Trump did deploy security guards, who patrolled in trucks marked ESTATE SECURITY and followed residents who used the farm roads on the estate. Police were frequently called to the Trump property. In July 2010 they responded to a complaint from Trump employees about two filmmakers who had come to an office. By the time the officers arrived, Anthony Baxter and Richard Phinney had moved on to Susan Munro’s house. The police followed them there and interrogated them as the camera continued to record. When the police demanded that they stop filming, Baxter refused. A tussle over the camera ensued. The police forced Baxter to the ground and took him and Phinney into custody. The episode would become a major plot point in the 2011 documentary You’ve Been Trumped, which Baxter presented at dozens of film festivals before it was aired by the BBC.
In August 2010 Trump sent a survey and fencing crew to claim a sliver of property that Michael Forbes was using. Forbes came out to argue with them, with a property map that showed the boundary. Police who had accompanied the Trump workers ordered Forbes to step back while a fence was installed. If Forbes wanted to contest this seizure, they said, he could take it up with government authorities, but they were there to satisfy the crew’s request for protection. (Documents in the local land register would show that the boundary determined by Trump’s men was correct.)
In October, during a tour of the construction site, a small convoy of black sport utility vehicles brought Trump and his son Donald Jr. to David Milne’s house. Milne refused to meet with them and asked them to leave. Later a film crew that was present to report on the Menie project for the Golf Channel TV network captured Trump discussing Milne’s house with a young woman named Sarah Malone, whom he had recently hired as “executive vice president.” Malone admittedly knew nothing about golf courses, but she was so beautiful she had won a contest to become the Face of Aberdeen.
“Sarah, I want to get rid of that house,” said Trump.
“It’s going to create a bit of a stir, but if we’re up for it, let’s do it,” she answered.
“Who cares, you know what, who cares? It’s our property. We can do what we want. We’re trying to build the greatest course in the world … his house is ugly.”
The same camera operators recorded Trump speaking to head greenkeeper Paul O’Connor, whom he had hired away from the famous course at Carnoustie. As he gestured toward Milne’s home, Trump said, “I don’t know what the fucking problem is.” A moment later he added, “I gotta make a change if you’re not going to do it.”
Eleven days after Milne turned Trump away, men working for Trump installed a fence that ran along Milne’s driveway and then encircled his house. They also pounded a blue stake into the ground next to Milne’s garage. Two weeks later he received a notice from Trump’s representatives demanding that he tear down the garage. Next, a work crew installed a second fence, closer to Milne’s home, and he received a letter demanding he pay $4,000 for it. Milne didn’t comply with any of the demands. A row of Sitka spruce were planted by Trump workers along the fence line, blocking the view of the sea that had prompted Milnes and his wife, Moira, to buy their home in the first place. Next came a wall of earth twenty feet high and one hundred feet long, pushed up behind Milne’s house. Still Milne refused to negotiate, and in days the greenkeeper O’Connor resigned.16
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The feud between Trump and his neighbors made for good copy in the newspapers and lively TV viewing, but it was often a torment for the holdouts. Susan Munro may have been the most affected. The construction of a parking lot near a temporary golf clubhouse flooded the road to her home, washing it out and making it impassable. Five weeks passed before it was fixed. Worse were the piles of dirt, twenty-feet high, made at the boundary of her house lot. These berms, planted with trees, spared golfers the sight of the Munro house as they parked their cars. They also deprived the Munros of vistas that they had enjoyed for decades. In winter the berms even blocked the light from the sun. When she stopped to think about it, Munro felt shocked. She said, “Living here, so far from everything, who would ever think that this bloody American could come and do this to you?”
The press reports on their plight won Munro and the others growing support at home and abroad, as newspaper readers sent letters and postcards urging them on. When Anthony Baxter’s film You’ve Been Trumped was set to air on the BBC Trump’s lawyers asked the network to cancel the showing because they considered it defamatory and misleading. The Guardian newspaper reported that Trump had called filmmaker Baxter a “stupid fool.” The network refused Trump’s request. The audience, estimated at 1.1 million viewers, was forty percent above the average for the Sunday night series that presented the film.
In the wake of You’ve Been Trumped Michael Forbes won the most votes in the annual “Top Scot” competition sponsored by the whiskey company Glenfiddich. Forbes donned his kilt for the ceremony. Donald Trump announced that the bars and restaurants at his properties would no longer serve Glenfiddich whiskeys. The award made to Forbes, Trump added, “is a terrible embarrassment to Scotland.”
Trump didn’t make things any easier on himself with such self-serving pronouncements. Typical was his attempt to rename the dunes “the Great Dunes of Scotland” because they were “the biggest dunes in the world.” When told they weren’t the biggest, Trump accepted the correction, but he wouldn’t agree that he was arrogant to assume that he could suddenly rename a geological feature that had been known to the world for generations. He put it, “Arrogant would be if I called them the Donald J. Trump Special Dunes.”17
As earthmoving machines broke the land to create the first of Trump’s two planned golf courses, the housing market in Scotland and the rest of Europe remained weak, and entire developments of vacation homes in much sunnier spots, such as the coast of Spain, were abandoned. No start was made on any of the buildings Trump had promised for the Menie Estate, and he continued to complain about the wind-energy project planned for the waters just offshore. The British government was committed to the idea, and Scottish first minister Salmond had worked hard to get the European Union’s approval for a wind-energy test field in the North Sea waters. Trump said that Salmond had assured him the windmills would not be built. He insisted that he was fighting not just for himself, but for the country, because windmills were a bad technology. “We have to save Scotland,” he declared. “You cannot allow these industrial monstrosities.” Later he compared wind-power plans to one of the most tragic events in recent history, the tragic bombing, in 1988, of a passenger jet over Lockerbie, Scotland: “Wind farms are a disaster for Scotland like Pan Am 103, an abomination, only sustained with government subsidy.”
In his political war with Alex Salmond, Trump sounded like his younger self tangling with Ed Koch. He referred to Salmond as “mad Alex” and funded the efforts of a group opposed to the turbines. Citing his status as a Global Scot, he wrote to the Scottish Parliament to oppose the wind farm, which he said threatened his investment of “tens of millions of pounds.” The amount Trump had spent at the Menie Estate, which was noted as a boon to the region, was actually in doubt. In 2011 Trump claimed to have already spent sixty million pounds on his way to building the most expensive course ever seen in the United Kingdom.
The mentions of big money were obviously intended to impress upon Scottish officials that Trump was both serious and capable. But considering that a recently opened course in western Scotland called Machrihanish Dunes had been built for 1.5 million pounds, the figures didn’t add up. Andrew Wightman, a writer and land-use consultant in Edinburgh, looked at corporation reports and discovered that Trump had paid less than 7 million pounds for Menie Estate, all of which went to Tom Griffin in America, and spent less than 14 million to develop it. By the time these facts were made public, Trump and the press had moved on to other issues. Besides, it was easy to simply disseminate exciting claims that huge sums were being spent, but difficult to parse corporation reports and then publish the boring details.18
No specific accounting was available on the money Trump had paid lawyers, or on how much he had spent attacking the wind project. But as he pursued the argument about the windmills, Trump laid the groundwork for an argument that would justify him walking away from the parts of his plan that would have produced the jobs and business revenues that had seemed so tantalizing to Scottish officials. When he lost this fight, he withdrew his application to build the second course and directed his attention, and his money, elsewhere. Soon he would announce that he had purchased famous courses at Doonbeg, Ireland, and at Turnberry, Scotland.
The one course Trump completed on the Menie Estate was judged by experts to be of beautiful design, thanks to the land and Martin Hawtree, but hardly the best in the world. Instead of more than a thousand jobs, Trump had delivered perhaps two hundred, and many of them were seasonal. The planning approvals he had received for housing and a hotel would remain attached to the property. He could wait for the next economic bubble, build and sell all the homes he proposed, and escape with a big profit. Alternatively, he could sell all the acreage to someone else, who would inherit the rights to all the development that had been approved.19
In Balmedie, the residents he had battled so furiously were left to feel battered and confused. Pilloried in the Aberdeen papers and scorned by locals who had anticipated a golf boom, they struggled to understand why someone would swoop into their community, promise so much, accomplish so little, and cause so much upset. Jack McConnell, who had tried at the beginning to accommodate Trump, was named to the House of Lords by the queen. Alex Salmond led a failed campaign for Scottish independence and then resigned his post as first minister. Sarah Malone, the Face of Aberdeen and of Trump’s development, married the editor of the local Press and Journal, which had backed the golf development from its inception. On the Isle of Lewis, the trust seeking to restore Lord Lever’s castle had yet to receive funds from Mary Anne Trump’s son, the billionaire Global Scot.