Commander in Cheat

by Rick Reilly

  The Trump: “That course would not have been open for 10 years more had I not gotten involved,” Trump told Crain’s New York Business. “It wasn’t getting built. Nobody could get it open.… I was able to do it. I got it open.” Ivanka Trump even went so far as to blog that “My family was able to do in two years what the city hadn’t been able to do in two decades.… My father went out to the construction site, where he saw a bunch of guys literally moving sand from one end of the course to the other. He essentially looked at them and said, ‘You guys have made a lot of money pushing sand around for the last 20 years, but that stops with me. It’s time to get this done.’ And they did.”

  The Truth: No. The course was almost done except for the greens, a few cart paths, and a couple lightning shelters. Adrian Benepe, who was the NYC parks commissioner at the time, still shudders about it. “That was the first time I realized the whole family was pathological liars,” Benepe says. “Ivanka just made her story up. Just invented it. He didn’t bring that course in. We finished it.”

  The Trump: When Trump became POTUS, his son Eric became the mouthpiece for all the golf properties, and a new generation of fable telling began. Ten years after Trump signed on, they finally opened the clubhouse. (Although it wasn’t really ready to open. They did it to coincide with the 2018 U.S. Open on Long Island.) Eric came to the ribbon-cutting ceremony and said, “You literally cannot get on the course, it’s so packed.”

  The Truth: It definitely is not hard to get on Ferry Point. On June 30, 2018—a Saturday—I went to their website to book a tee time for the next morning. A Sunday summer morning tee time in New York, on a course that’s “packed”? That would be hard, right? All they had left for a foursome was 9:40 a.m., 11:30, 11:40, 11:50, noon, 12:10 p.m., 12:30, 12:40, 12:50, 1:00, 1:10, 1:20, 1:40, 2:00, 2:10, 2:20, 2:40, 2:50, 3:00, 3:10… you get the idea.

  The Trump: Eric Trump said business at Ferry Point is “spectacular.”

  The Truth: Business is not spectacular. In 2016, gross receipts were down 9% from 2015. In 2017, they were down 17% from 2016. That’s been true across all of golf, but it’s particularly grating when a city is trying to make back the whopping $127 million it sunk into a course.

  The Trump: Eric and Ivanka speak of Ferry Point as some kind of city-beautification project that the family sacrificed to build, out of their civic hearts, like they ought to be on a United Way poster.

  The Truth: The Trumps have been paid and paid well for operating the place. As for brightening the lives of Bronx golfers, they haven’t. At $175 a round for a resident, almost nobody from the Bronx can play it. The patrons are mostly Wall Street guys and midtown execs and Yankees pitchers with the day off. By far, the biggest winners in the deal have been the Trumps.

  The Trump: When it opened, Trump tweeted:

  TrumpGolf Links at Ferry Point will host many major championships over the years. Great thing for NYC—congratulations to all!

  The Truth: It has yet to have one.

  6

  THE GREAT MUCKLE GYPE

  I think his mother would be horrified.

  —MAIRI STERLAND, TRUMP’S COUSIN

  IN SCOTLAND, DONALD TRUMP is less popular than tipping. They hated him before he was president, and now they hate him more than the English. They don’t hide it. I saw one guy who held up a giant sign that read: “Keep Scotland Great—Get Trump Out.”

  Since I speak a little Scottish, allow me to translate a few others:

  • Trump You Great Muckle Gype! (Trump You Big Lumpy Fool!)

  • Trump You Tangerine Roaster! (Trump You Orange Idiot!)

  • Clackwanker! (Douche!)

  • You Weapons-Grade Wanker! (You Very Large Jagoff!)

  • Trump Is a Witless Cocksplat! (Trump Is a Dummy Head!)

  • Trump You Clueless Numpty! (Trump You Stupid Know-Nothing!)

  • You Wankmaggot! (Doesn’t translate.)

  • What a Gobshite! (What a Useless Prick!)

  • Trump You Orange Bawbag! (Trump You Orange Testicle Sack!)

  • Get Out, King Fucktwaddle (Self-explanatory.)

  That’s a lot of animus for a guy whose mother was born in Scotland. If anybody else with a Scottish-born mother had been elected U.S. president, Scotland might have given him Dundee and half of Edinburgh. “It’s hard to put into words how big that would be here,” says John Huggan, the longtime Scottish golf writer. “A half-Scottish president? Oh my god. But now it’s just completely the opposite. He is genuinely hated here. I haven’t met anybody who wants him here. He’s an arse. He’s the walking caricature of what some Scots think Americans are like—loud, brash, and obnoxious.”

  Among the things they hate about him is that everything he seems to know about the UK you could fit on the head of a golf tee. For instance, Trump owns a golf course in Ireland called Doonbeg. At the press conference Trump held before his July 2018 trip to the British Isles, a reporter asked Trump if he was worried about the high level of venom the UK spits his way. “I believe the people in the UK—Scotland, Ireland, I have property in Ireland, as you know—those people they like me a lot.” The only problem with that answer is that Ireland isn’t in the UK. That’s Northern Ireland.

  His White House staff doesn’t seem to know where Scotland is, either. As he was leaving England to go visit his Trump Turnberry golf resort on the west coast of Scotland, the official White House Twitter page announced:

  Today, @realDonaldTrump and @FLOTUS had tea with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle before departing the UK.

  The only problem with that tweet is that Turnberry is very much in the UK, as is Scotland, come to think of it.

  On June 24, 2016—the day after the UK’s Brexit vote—Trump happened to be in Turnberry. He tweeted:

  Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back.

  The only problem with that tweet is that Scotland voted 62% against Brexit.

  He then went to a raucous ribbon-cutting press conference, set in front of the Turnberry lighthouse, escorted by bagpipers in kilts and was confronted by a comedian who threw Nazi-logo golf balls at him.

  It got worse. He returned home and started telling reporters that he’d predicted Brexit. “I was in Turnberry the day before,” he said more than a few times. “I saw it coming.” The only problem with that is he was there the day after, and every UK newspaper has proof.

  Then, somehow, it got worse than that. On his 2018 UK visit, Double Down doubled down. “I predicted Brexit,” he told the Sun newspaper of London. “I was cutting a ribbon for the opening of Turnberry—you know they totally did a whole renovation, it is beautiful—the day before the Brexit vote… I said, ‘Brexit will happen.’ The vote is going to go positive, because people don’t want to be faced with the horrible immigration problems.” Then he REPEATED it.

  Finally, just to add a little seasoning to the whole bouillabaisse of naked lies, bonehead errors, and cultural insults, Trump said, “You know, my mother is from here. I’m Scotch.”

  The only problem with that is nobody’s “Scotch.” They’re Scottish.

  Blue-eyed Maryanne MacLeod was born on the Isle of Lewis, about as far north in Scotland as you can go, in a tiny town called Tong, near Stornoway, youngest of 10 children of peasant parents. In 1930, at age 17, she boarded the ship Transylvania out of Glasgow, bound for New York, to live with a sister. All but one of her siblings would do the same—chain migration, as Trump calls it. She worked as a maid until she happened to meet a rich German-born New York apartment tycoon name Fred Trump and married him in 1936.

  But what kind of story is that? Young Donald Trump went to work making it sound better. “She was on vacation in America when she met my dad,” he tells people.

  Trump’s mother had five kids—Maryanne, Frederick Jr., Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert—and returned to Tong every year, still speaking fluent Scottish Gaelic despite her fancy Bloomingdale’s dresses. She
returned every year until late into the 1990s, but Donald only went with her once, as a toddler, and never went again. Maybe it’s what the Scottish wind does to that hairdo, which makes it look like a snapping red wolverine.

  Never went again, that is, until 2006, when he wanted to build a luxury public golf resort near Balmedie, just north of Aberdeen on the east coast. For $11 million, he’d purchased an old shooting ranch called the Menie Estate, perched on a delicate stretch of dunes land designated SSSI—Site of Special Scientific Interest—Scotland’s most sensitive grade. Environmental groups were breathless with anger over the idea. They pointed out, over and over, how much damage building a golf course could do to the giant, fragile, constantly moving dunes, much less Trump’s two courses, not to mention an eight-story, five-star, 450-room hotel, a sports complex, 950 time-share apartments, and 36 villas. Made no difference to Trump. He wanted it, and he was going to get it.

  So the day before he was to plead his case in front of the Aberdeenshire Council, he landed his jet in nearby Stornoway and visited his cousin, who still lives in the childhood home of his dear Scottish mother.

  For 96 seconds.

  He came up the walk, cameras clicking, waved a few times, went into the house, looked around, and came briskly out. Then he held a press conference that was two hours, or 75 times longer than the visit, mentioning more than once that he was “Scotch” and he was going to build “the greatest golf course in the world” and that he would create 6,000 jobs and bring $1.2 billion to the local economy. That figure, of course, was flubberdeegook. He’d started with $300 million and lathered his way up as he went.

  Later, a Trump cousin, Mairi Sterland, told a Scottish blogger: “I used to laugh about [being related to] Donald Trump. Now I hardly dare mention him.… He is outrageous. You quail at the thought of what he’s capable of.”

  The “Hey, I’m Scotch, too” gambit didn’t work. In November 2007, the council turned him down.

  No problem. Trump went over their heads. He started wining and dining the head of the nation, Scotland First Minister Alex Salmond, a pro-business stalwart. “Salmond believed Trump’s crap,” says Suzanne Kelly, a reporter for the Aberdeen Voice. “He enjoyed flying back and forth to New York, eating Trump’s steak and lobster dinners. He got the Trump mojo put on him.” A year later, Salmond decided to override the environmentalists and the locals and the Aberdeenshire Council and grant Trump permission to build his golf resort, dunes be damned.

  “Six thousand jobs across Scotland, 1,400 local and permanent jobs in the northeast of Scotland,” Salmond reasoned. “That outweighs the environmental concerns.”

  Construction of the greatest course in the world was ready to start.

  First thing Trump needed was an architect.

  “First of all, he told me right away he never wanted to build any 36 holes,” says American architect Tom Doak. “He told me, ‘I asked for 36, hoping to get permitted for 18. All I wanted was the 18.’ But then the Scottish government stepped in and gave him 36. ‘And I don’t even WANT 36!’” That was a problem for any architect to have to build an extra 18 boring “resort” holes and a problem for Trump to have to build them. “There were a ton of problems. I turned him down.” Finally, on reportedly his fifth try, he got a respected English designer, Martin Hawtree.

  Cue the bulldozers, accompanied by the screaming of the dunes huggers, who abhorred the flattening and pinning down of giant dunes that migrate 11 meters per year. In Scotland, moving dunes is akin to cementing over Walden Pond. Trump argued that by preventing sand movement he was “preserving the dunes.” That’s like saying a T-bone preserves the cow.

  “That’s a live dune system,” says renowned Scottish designer David McLay Kidd. “When you stop them from moving, they’re effectively dead.”

  Kidd would know. He was the last architect to build a golf course in an ultra-sensitive dunes site—the first to try in 100 years—in Machrihanish, which you drive to by taking Paul McCartney’s long and winding road. They were so careful with the dunes, they might as well have been wearing oven mitts. “We used no heavy equipment at all,” reports David Southworth, the American developer of the project. “Nothing. We did it with shovels, by hand. We couldn’t disturb the orchids. We worked hand-in-hand with the environmentalists and the local people. It was a real challenge.” What they gave them is a course called Machrihanish Dunes, which has been called “the most natural course on earth.” What they gave him back is no protesters, no lawsuits, and no pissed-off locals.

  Back to Trump. Reporters started digging in on the deal. Turns out, before Trump had shown official interest in the Menie Estate, he’d secretly tried to buy the neighboring houses and farms he thought were ugly, houses he didn’t want his customers to have to look at. He sent his project director, Neil Hobday, knocking on doors, pretending to be an innocent passerby named “Peter White” (Hobday’s middle names), inquiring cheerily if their homes were for sale. None were.

  Would they want to sell them anyway, for a good price?

  No, they wouldn’t.

  Trump bought the estate anyway and began brooding about those “ugly” houses.

  Plan B: Trump had his lawyers apply to have the local government use eminent domain to buy the houses or, as they say in Scotland, “compulsory purchase.” Didn’t matter that this isn’t at all how compulsory purchase works. It’s meant for homes that are blighted, homes that stand in the way of a highway or a park. It’s not a way for one neighbor to force out another because they don’t like how his crabgrass looks. Again: Denied. (Trump’s publicity people later claimed the “compulsory purchase” story was made up to build sympathy for the dunes residents. The only problem with that claim is that nearly every paper in Scotland has copies of Trump’s application.)

  Plan C: Start making life hell for the holdouts. Trump declared that one property, owned by a farmer named Michael Forbes, was a “slum” and that Forbes lived like a “pig.” Then, just for seasoning, he added, “My mother was born in Stornoway. She was the most clean woman I’ve ever seen, immaculate. The people of Scotland are that way.… Maybe his heritage is from somewhere other than Scotland.”

  Forbes didn’t go punch Trump and he didn’t sue him. Instead, he put up a Mexican flag—in solidarity with other Trump insultees—and told Trump to “take his money and shove it up his arse.” Not long after, Forbes and his elderly mother, Molly, who lives nearby, started having trouble with their water lines. She didn’t sue, either. Instead, she just started trapping rain water in old paint buckets and getting water from a stream via wheelbarrow. She wouldn’t move, either.

  A neighbor named David Milne woke up one day to find that Trump had planted a row of giant trees blocking his 40-mile view of the coastline. He also found new 20-foot-high, 70-foot-long earth berms starting three feet from his property line, plus a new fence on two sides of his property, for which Trump sent him a $3,500 bill. Milne didn’t sue. Instead, he threw away the bill, put up a Mexican flag, and waited for the trees to die. “Trump planted the wrong kind,” Milne says. “Sitka spruces. Sitkas don’t do well in our high winds and sea air.” They did die. Trump’s crews replaced those with more Sitkas, fronted by cypresses this time. “They’ll die, too,” Milne told me in July of 2018. “We can already see the sea through the gaps.”

  None of them moved. In fact, they moved others. They became local heroes. When a documentary came out about the whole mess—You’ve Been Trumped—they became national heroes. In fact, Michael Forbes was named “Scot of the Year” by Glenfiddich scotch. That fried Trump’s brain. He immediately banned Glenfiddich from all his properties, tweeting…

  Michael Forbes lives in a pigsty and bad liquor company Glenfiddich gave him Scot of the Year award.… Does anyone smell publicity stunt?

  … thus giving Glenfiddich more publicity than it could have ever dreamed.

  It all amounted to a Scottish standoff. At press time, the second course still hadn’t come, nor the hotel, nor the time
-share condos, nor the 6,000 new jobs, nor the $1.28 billion for the economy. There was some talk about Trump trying again to build homes—500 of them—but when a Scotland Natural Heritage report came out in late summer 2018 showing that some of the dunes and much of the marine terraces had been damaged beyond repair, chances looked dismal for that, too.

  “Donald Trump didn’t do what he promised,” admitted a sheepish Alex Salmond. “Balmedie got 10 cents on the dollar.”

  One golf course was built, though—Trump International Golf Links Scotland—and it’s pretty good, if you like links courses that seemed to have been dreamed up by an interior designer. Links courses are supposed to be watered by the rain and cut by the wind. They’re supposed to be a wrestling match between brown and green, with brown ahead on points. Bathed in wind, you play them along the ground, the kind of places where you putt from 100 yards out. Trump’s course is much too lush, greener than the lawn of the Kentucky governor, so green it’s blue-green. It doesn’t thump. It swishes. Your feet sink.

  The other problem is nobody plays it. I spent two days walking on it (under Scotland’s Right to Roam laws) and never saw much of anybody—no Trump, no guards, and only one foursome each day. It was empty. For one, it’s too expensive (almost $370 per round). For another, it’s too Trump. “There might be people who would like to play it,” says Martin Ford, an Aberdeenshire official who voted against the course, “but they don’t want to give Trump their money.”