Trump International Golf Links, which opened in 2012, lost $1.36 million last year, according to public accounts. From their kitchen window, John and Susan Munro used to have a view of the Scottish coastline, until it was blocked by an earthen berm built by Mr. Trump’s people.
In 2016, when the Mail Online reported on a “92-year-old Scotswoman taking on Trump”, readers were appalled to learn Molly Forbes had to collect water from a nearby stream in a bucket because, she claims, Trump’s construction workers had cut off her supply.
Branded The Trump Estate, the plans feature cottages, shops, food outlets and million-dollar homes. The new 18-hole course will also be named MacLeod, in honor of Trump's mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, who was raised on the Scottish island of Lewis.
Touted as the "world's greatest golf resort" by a pre-White House Trump, the development was expected to invest over $1 billion into the sleepy coastal region, creating 6,000 jobs at two new championship golf courses and a 450-bedroom luxury hotel, alongside constructing close to 1,500 vacation and residential homes.
It has been five years since Trump first flew into Aberdeenshire on his helicopter, bulldozing sand dunes, cutting off the Forbes’ water supply, insulting them publicly and filing motions to force people out of their homes.
Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of the film is that Trump agrees to speak to Baxter, even after the first documentary came out, because it was "picked up by the BBC" and changed his view of the documentary maker.
Anthony Baxter’s follow-up to his 2011 documentary, You’ve Been Trumped, focusing on the rise of Trump’s golf courses in Scotland and the corresponding degradation of Aberdeenshire's people and habitat, spares no punches.
Michael Forbes finally takes the matter into his own hands, and digs up the water pipe leading to his house which the Trump team promised was in good shape. It was backlogged with stones and had holes in it, allowing sludge from the road to contaminate the water supply. Now he and his mother have running water.
Trump said he should not comment on the matter, and leave it to governor Rick Snyder who had a "difficult job". Snyder has been widely criticised for telling residents the water was safe to drink when it was not. Baxter also documents the struggle he had to film the story.
Addressing his controversial penchant for big-game hunting, the younger Donald bizarrely praises hunters as lovers of animals (“Hunters are conservationists at heart as well”) and argues that his hunting trips are actually charitable humanitarian endeavors. “We always donate shoes and boots and everything like that because these are parts of the world where, as sad as it sounds, owning one shoe is a luxury. Two is almost unheard of.”
Forbes is one of the residents of Balmedie, Scotland, who’s been waging a David vs. Goliath battle for years against Trump over a luxury golf course that opened in 2012 right down the road. The development of the new Trump International Golf Links ruined protected natural sand dunes, failing spectacularly to deliver on a plethora of lofty promises Trump had personally made to local citizens and politicians—namely, economic growth and thousands of new jobs.
But it’s Forbes and his mother, Molly, who live on adjacent farms near the golf course, who have suffered most greatly from tangling with the presidential hopeful—and are ill-equipped to give him the kind of legal fight that would cost a fortune to wage. The problem stems from the damage made when Trump’s workers broke a crucial pipe that connected their homes to the only nearby water source.
Despite their pleas and increasing scrutiny from local media and officials, Trump and his people refused to repair the contaminated water line, forcing the 92-year-old Molly Forbes to collect water from a stream she carted back to her home in a wheelbarrow. For four years.
Even Andy Wightman , a member of the Scottish Parliament, confirms that it’s Trump who is legally accountable for fixing his neighbors’ access to water that lies on his land—and is violating Scottish law by refusing to do so.
Even Alex Salmond, a former Scottish First Minister who once supported Trump’s dealings in Scotland, admits Trump only delivered a fraction of what he promised. Of the 6,000 new jobs Trump promised to create for the region with his golf course, he employs what locals guesstimate to be a few dozen staffers, “and fewer than 100 are on the payroll,” says Baxter.
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Trump owns two Scottish golf courses – the Trump International Golf Links, in Aberdeenshire and Turnberry in Ayrshire.
Filmmaker Baxter has been crowdfunding to raise $75,000 to boost the film’s profile in America, with three days to go he is $10,000 off his target.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Trump International Golf Links said: ‘Trump International would never conduct the type of activity claimed by Molly Forbes.
She continued: ‘The ‘well’, is shared with another neighbouring property owner, who will confirm that their water system has historically been unreliable and fraught with problems, long before Trump owned the land.
David and Moira Milne had already been threatened with legal action by Mr. Trump’s lawyers, who claimed that 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.
Europe | In Scotland, Trump Built a Wall. Then He Sent Residents the Bill.
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 the Balmedie golf course.
The Milnes now fly a Mexican flag from their hilltop house, a former coast guard station that overlooks the clubhouse of Trump International Golf Links, whenever Mr. Trump visits.
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.”
Credit Credit... 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.
Mr. Salmond said that Mr. Trump’s impact on business in Scotland might actually be a net negative because his xenophobic comments have appalled the Scottish establishment so much 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.
The site contained areas of mobile sand and dunes that were semi-fixed in position, as well as marshes, dune grassland, and low-lying areas called dune slacks, according to a government document designating Foveran Links as a site of special scientific interest.
NatureScot, Scotland's conservation agency, said that Foveran Links was "a very high-quality example of a sand dune system characteristic of north east Scotland, and was of exceptional importance for the wide variety of coastal landforms and processes."
Officials announced in December 2020 that the coastal sand dunes Trump's the resort would lose their status as a protected environmental site because they had been partially destroyed.
The environmental campaign group Avaaz has sued in the Scottish courts in an attempt to force the government to issue an "unexplained wealth order" that would demand details of Trump's golf financing.
Insider has obtained before-and-after photos from the satellite technology firm Maxar, which show the dramatic destruction of the prized Foveran Links sand dunes between March 2010 and April 2021.
Images taken of the course in April 2021 show how many of the sand dune features at the southern third of Foveran Links, where Trump's golf course was built, had been partially destroyed.
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Now, the doc re-branded as "The Film He Doesn’t Want You to See" and "The Film Donald Trump Tried to Shut Down" is available iTunes, Amazon, GooglePlay, Journeyman VOD and Vimeo.
Trump himself previously derided Forbes as living in a "pigsty" and called him "an embarrassment to Scotland."
Branded The Trump Estate, the plans feature cottages, shops, food outlets and million-dollar homes. The new 18-hole course will also be named MacLeod, in honor of Trump's mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, who was raised on the Scottish island of Lewis.
Trump International, the documentary claims, also cut off the family's water supply — for five years. (The company has called those claims “defamatory” and “untrue.”)
This was particularly difficult for Molly, then in her late 80s, who was forced to dip tin cans into a nearby stream to draw water for her plants and hens.
Aside from a boutique hotel with 21 rooms, neither the promised luxury hotel nor any of the 1,500 homes have so far been built.
Since Trump became president, his company's involvement in Aberdeenshire has changed, locals say — for now, at least.