[As many Americans are trying to figure out what kind of president they have just elected, the people of Balmedie, a small village outside the once oil-rich city of Aberdeen, say they have a pretty good idea. In the 10 years since Mr. Trump first visited, vowing to build “the world’s greatest golf course” on an environmentally protected site featuring 4,000-year-old sand dunes, they have seen him lash out at anyone standing in his way. They say they watched him win public support for his golf course with grand promises, then watched him break them one by one.]
By
Katrin Bennhold
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Mr. Trump with bagpipers
during a ceremony in 2010 at the site of his proposed
golf course in northeastern Scotland.
Credit David Moir/Reuters
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BALMEDIE,
Scotland — President-elect
Donald J. Trump has already built a wall — not on the border with Mexico, but
on the border of his exclusive golf course in northeastern Scotland, blocking
the sea view of local residents who refused to sell their homes.
And then he sent them the bill.
David and Moira Milne had already been
threatened with legal action by Mr. Trump’s lawyers, who claimed a corner of
their garage belonged to him, when they came home from work one day to find his
staff building a fence around their garden. Two rows of grown trees went up
next, blocking the view. Their water and electricity lines were temporarily
cut. And then a bill for about $3,500 arrived in the mail, which, Mr. Milne
said, went straight into the trash.
“You watch, Mexico won’t pay either,” said
Mr. Milne, a health and safety consultant and part-time novelist, referring to
Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to build a “beautiful, impenetrable wall” along
the border and force the Mexicans to pay for it.
The Milnes now fly a Mexican flag from their
hilltop house, a former Coast Guard station that overlooks the clubhouse of Mr.
Trump’s Trump International Golf Links, whenever he visits.
So do Susan and John Munro, who also refused
to sell up and now face an almost 15-foot-high earthen wall built by Mr.
Trump’s people on two sides of their property.
Michael Forbes, a quarry worker whose home
sits on the opposite side of the Trump property, added a second flag — “Hillary
for President” — perhaps because Mr. Trump publicly accused him of living “like
a pig” and called him a “disgrace” for not selling his “disgusting” and
“slumlike” home.
As many Americans are trying to figure out
what kind of president they have just elected, the people of Balmedie, a small
village outside the once oil-rich city of Aberdeen, say they have a pretty good
idea. In the 10 years since Mr. Trump first visited, vowing to build “the
world’s greatest golf course” on an environmentally protected site featuring
4,000-year-old sand dunes, they have seen him lash out at anyone standing in
his way. They say they watched him win public support for his golf course with
grand promises, then watched him break them one by one.
A promised $1.25 billion investment has
shrunk to what his opponents say is at most $50 million. Six thousand jobs have
dwindled to 95. Two golf courses to one. An eight-story 450-room luxury hotel
never materialized, nor did 950 time-share apartments. Instead, an existing
manor house was converted into a 16-room boutique hotel. Trump International
Golf Links, which opened in 2012, lost $1.36 million last year, according to
public accounts.
“If America wants to know what is coming, it
should study what happened here. It’s predictive,” said Martin Ford, a local
government representative. “I have just seen him do in America, on a grander
scale, precisely what he did here. He suckered the people and he suckered the
politicians until he got what he wanted, and then he went back on pretty much
everything he promised.”
Alex Salmond, a former first minister of
Scotland whose government granted Mr. Trump planning permission in 2008,
overruling local officials, now concedes the point, saying: “Balmedie got 10
cents on the dollar.”
Sarah Malone, who came to Mr. Trump’s
attention after winning a local beauty pageant and is now a vice president of
Trump International, disputed some of the figures publicly discussed about the
project, saying that Mr. Trump invested about $125 million and that the golf
course now employed 150 people.
“While other golf and leisure projects were
shelved due to lack of funds,” she said, “Mr. Trump continued to forge ahead
with his plans and has put the region on the global tourism map, and this
resort plays a vital role in the economic prosperity of northeast Scotland.”
Mr. Salmond said that Mr. Trump’s impact on
business in Scotland might actually be a net negative because his xenophobic
comments have so appalled the Scottish establishment that the Royal &
Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, known simply as the R&A, is unlikely to
award his other Scottish golf course, the world-renowned Trump Turnberry,
another prestigious golf tournament like the Open anytime soon.
“I don’t see the R&A going back to
Turnberry, which is a tragedy in itself,” Mr. Salmond said. “But it’s also a
huge economic blow: Several hundred million pounds lost — or, in Trump terms,
billions.”
Mr. Trump, whose mother emigrated from
Scotland to New York in 1930, never showed any great interest in her place of
birth. But in 2008, the same year he applied for planning permission in
Balmedie, he visited the pebble-dashed cottage on the Isle of Lewis in Western
Scotland where she grew up.
After emerging from his private jet and
handing out copies of his book “How to Get Rich,” he reportedly told locals how
Scottish he felt. “I feel very comfortable here,” Mr. Trump said before spending
less than two minutes with his cousins in his mother’s homestead, The Guardian
reported at the time. Within about three hours his private jet had taken off.
The visit clearly did not impress Mr. Ford,
then the chairman of the planning committee at Aberdeenshire Council, which
refused Mr. Trump permission for his golf course on environmental grounds. The
4,000-year-old dunes, the committee concluded, were a “site of special
scientific interest,” or as Mr. Ford put it, “Scotland’s equivalent of the
Amazonian rain forest.”
In the end, it was Mr. Salmond, a
self-described golf fanatic whose constituency includes Balmedie, who came to
Mr. Trump’s defense, granting permission to proceed in the “national economic
interest.”
“Six thousand jobs across Scotland, 1,400
local and permanent jobs in the northeast of Scotland,” Mr. Salmond said at the
time. “That outweighs the environmental concerns.”
Eight years later he contends that Mr. Trump
took him in: “If knowing what I know now I had the ability to go back, I would
rewrite that page,” Mr. Salmond said in an interview this week. “Most
developments balance economic against environmental issues. The problem, and
it’s a big problem, is that Donald Trump didn’t do what he promised.”
Mr. Trump later fell out badly with Mr.
Salmond (whom he now calls “mad Alex” and a “has-been”), first because he
refused to evict residents by eminent domain and then over his plans to install
offshore wind turbines a couple of miles from Mr. Trump’s golf course.
“If Scotland doesn’t stop insane policy of
obsolete, bird-killing wind turbines, country will be destroyed,” Mr. Trump
wrote on Twitter in 2014.
At a parliamentary inquiry about renewable
energy in 2012, Mr. Trump warned that Scotland would get into “serious trouble”
if it continued to build wind turbines. Asked what evidence he had, he said: “I
am the evidence.”
He then made a formal complaint about a Green
Party politician who had made fun of the statement with a still from the Monty
Python film “The Life of Brian,” accusing him of blasphemy and threatening to
take him to court.
The wind turbines, whose foundations are
expected to be laid next year, still seem to rankle Mr. Trump. In a meeting
right after his election victory, Mr. Trump urged Nigel Farage, the leader of
the populist U.K. Independence Party — which has failed to win a single seat in
Scotland — to fight offshore wind farms in Scotland on his behalf.
“To actually believe that having a
conversation with Nigel Farage and his henchmen about wind energy is going to
change Scottish government policy is on the outer limits of possibility,” Mr.
Salmond said.
As a presidential candidate who was caught on
a hot microphone bragging about sexually assaulting women, Mr. Trump found
little sympathy among Scotland’s political leaders, most of whom happen to be
women.
Nicola Sturgeon, Mr. Salmond’s successor, has
called Mr. Trump’s comments “deeply abhorrent” and stripped him of his
membership in the Global Scot business network. Kezia Dugdale, who runs the Scottish
Labour Party, commented after Mr. Trump’s election that a “misogynist” would
move into the White House, while Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish
Conservatives, described him as a “clay-brained guts, a knotty-pated fool.”
And in Aberdeen, where 10 years ago public
opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of Mr. Trump and his golf course, Robert
Gordon University annulled Mr. Trump’s honorary degree after his comments about
barring Muslims from entering the United States.
Some local residents remain fiercely loyal to
him. Stewart Spence, owner of the exclusive Marcliffe hotel, has a photo of Mr.
Trump and himself on display in the lobby as well as his own honorary
membership of Balmedie golf course.
“How many tourists have the dunes brought in?
Zero,” he said. “What he has done is build a beautiful golf course and made the
northeast of Scotland an amazing destination.”
As for the American election campaign, Mr.
Spence said, “He has done a fantastic selling job to the American people.”
Until six years ago, the Munros could look
out their kitchen window and see 10 miles across open land all the way to the
Girdleness lighthouse on the other side of Aberdeen. Now they look out onto the
nearly 15-foot-high earthen berm built by Mr. Trump’s people.
“He has a thing about walls, that Mr. Trump,”
Ms. Munro said. “I hope America has a better experience than Balmedie.”
