Tweeddale Dumb

How Trump wore out his Scottish welcome

Tweeddale lord: “Somewhere along the lines his Scottish heritage has gone awry.”

By Ben Schreckinger

In a land where Donald Trump first stormed the national political stage a decade ago, few are eager for his return on Thursday, when he will arrive for his maiden voyage abroad as the presumptive Republican nominee.

Rather than huddle with foreign dignitaries or address adoring masses, Trump will visit his golf courses. The businessman, who arrived here in 2006 to great fanfare and considerable political support, has since become a national bogeyman, his candidacy rattling Scots to the point that the country’s leaders now openly worry about the damage a Trump presidency could inflict on the United Kingdom’s most important alliance.

“As far as U.K.-U.S. relations are concerned, I think we’d have to build very strong allies in other parts of the administration and the U.S. Congress, because inevitably they would be strained,” Jeremy Purvis, a member of the U.K.’s House of Lords from southern Scotland, told POLITICO.

Initially, Trump’s promise to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a development in northern Scotland, a region anxious about its post-oil future, was welcomed by many. Since then, Trump’s attempts to evict his neighbors, his opposition to an offshore wind farm, and now his bombastic presidential campaign, have turned national opinion decidedly against him.

Scottish leaders see Trump as a representative of the same unexpectedly strong forces that favor Thursday’s Brexit referendum, which is opposed by the leaders of all major Scottish parties and endorsed by only two world political figures outside the U.K.: Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who wants to weaken the EU.

“I had hoped that more people would see through Trump and see it for what it is, but then again I thought that about the campaign to leave the European Union, which is fueled by the same fear and resentment,” said Patrick Harvie, leader of Scotland’s Green Party and a longtime Trump antagonist.

Because of the environmental ramifications of building on northern Scotland’s dune system, Trump’s proposed luxury golf complex at Aberdeen was always controversial, but it began with considerable backing from national political leaders, whom Trump wooed aggressively.

Now, no leader of a major party will attend Trump’s Friday ribbon-cutting ceremony at his Turnberry golf course, his second development here, on Scotland’s West Coast, near which locals hoisted a Mexican flag earlier this week to protest the businessman’s inflammatory rhetoric.

For Trump — who last traveled here last summer and will visit his Aberdeen course on Saturday — it is sign of just how deeply relations with his mother’s native country have soured.

In 2008, Purvis’ party, the Liberal Democrats, tried to boot a local official from party ranks for daring to reject a permit application for Trump’s first golf course here, a move that also lost the man his seat on the Aberdeenshire Council.

But the Lib Dems are no longer going to bat for the New York businessman. Instead, Willie Rennie, the leader of the Scottish wing of the party, plans to shame him on Thursday by visiting an Edinburgh mosque that Muslim leaders here had invited Trump to tour as an opportunity to learn about Islam. Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, did not respond to questions for this story, including about the mosque invitation. Edinburgh is not currently on the presumptive nominee’s itinerary.

For years, Trump’s greatest champion in the country was former First Minister Alex Salmond, of the Scottish National Party. A bombastic populist who draws frequent comparisons to Trump, Salmond was eager to attract the foreign investment, and stuck by the developer’s side as popular opinion turn against Trump over his clashes with Aberdeen residents, such as when Michael Forbes, an Aberdeenshire farmer with property near Trump’s course, was named the country’s “Top Scot” of 2012 for standing up to the businessman, who had threatened Forbes with eviction.

But Salmond soured on Trump as a result of the businessman’s failed bid to stop an offshore wind farm near his Aberdeen course and his call to ban Muslims from entering the United States, which Salmond deemed “racist.” Trump fired back in January by calling Salmond, now a member of the U.K. House of Commons, an “embarrassment to Scotland,” and ripping him for releasing Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a perpetrator of the 1988 airliner bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. (In 2009, Trump controversially rented an estate in New York to the bombing’s sponsor, Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi, and later sought other ties to Qadhafi’s regime).

Some in Aberdeenshire remain grateful for jobs and economic activity generated by Trump’s course, but the country as a whole has turned against him.

In response to his December call for the Muslim ban, Salmond’s successor as first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, also of the SNP, stripped him of his Global Scot status, which had been awarded by Salmond’s predecessor, Jack McConnell of the Labour Party, in 2006. A Scottish university also stripped Trump of an honorary degree.

Trump had been awarded the status on account of his mother’s Scottish citizenship, but Purvis said that unlike Ireland’s celebration of the Kennedys, Scotland would be “embarrassed” by a President Trump.

“Somewhere along the lines his Scottish heritage has gone awry,” he said.

Purvis is one of many Scots watching Trump strut the world political stage and getting flashbacks to the New York businessman’s Scottish odyssey, which saw him break one ancient Scottish law, formally accuse a member of Parliament of breaking another and make a lasting contribution to the capital’s political vernacular during unintentionally memorable parliamentary testimony in 2012.

“How he deals with politics seems to be remarkably like how he deals with property development and that is not conducive to being a representative of the wider public,” said Purvis, who served in the Scottish Parliament before ascending to the House of Lords.

In 2008, Trump was caught promoting his Aberdeen golf course with material bearing a Trump coat of arms, running afoul of a 17th century law that requires all such designs be registered with a body called the Court of the Lord Lyon. He later won official approval for the design.

In November 2012, Trump’s appearance at Holyrood, the seat of the Scottish Parliament, caused a stir when one of his bodyguards was spotted with a suspicious canister. It turned out to be hairspray.

Trump was there to make the case that the development of offshore wind farms would harm Scottish tourism, a position that contradicted the weight of testimony that Parliament had heard on the matter. Pressed by a lawmaker to offer evidence for his claim, Trump instead offered a memorable response: “First of all,” he said, motioning to himself, “I am the evidence.” The answer set off laughter and foreshadowed a presidential run that has been driven more by Trump’s claims of personal exceptionalism than any ideology or consistent set of positions.

Harvie, of the Green Party, mocked Trump by tweeting a picture of the crucifixion scene in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” superimposed with the words, “I am the evidence.” Trump complained to a public standards office that the tweet was “blasphemous.”

The Scottish blasphemy law was last enforced in 1843, and Trump’s complaint was dismissed, but the line lives on. “It’s entered the Scottish political vocabulary. If you don’t have an answer to a question, you can say, ‘I am the evidence,’” said a veteran political journalist who keeps an office at Holyrood.

“I encourage my boss to say it all the time,” joked Lib Dem communications director Adam Clarke, leaning back in his chair in the members’ chambers at Holyrood, which were deserted two days before the Brexit referendum with members campaigning in their constituencies.

Though most Scots oppose Brexit, Scottish independence activist Dean Halliday stands with Trump in favoring it, if only because he believes it would motivate Scots to leave the U.K. in order to remain in the EU. That doesn’t mean he’s a fan of the Republican standard-bearer.

Halliday said he was initially optimistic that Trump’s involvement would benefit the country. “There’s always a wee hope that something can be good for Scotland when you get a reputed businessman getting in saying he’s going to do wonders for Scotland,” said Halliday in the light of the campfire at a pro-independence vigil site that activists set up on the grounds of Holyrood in November.

For Halliday, that hope has evaporated. “Donald Trump can go run up my ribs,” said Halliday, meaning, more or less, go to hell.

Others were more welcoming of Trump. Amer Shehzad, a Pakistani immigrant manning the counter at the Mosque Kitchen, a curry shop near Edinburgh’s central house of Muslim worship, said Trump should accept the invitation, issued earlier this week by local leaders, to check out the city’s mosques. “He would see that Muslims are peaceful. They just do their worship. They don’t hurt anybody.”