D-Day for Donald Trump International Links Project
Today is D-Day for the Donald Trump International Golf Links project on the Menie Estate, a few miles north of Aberdeen. The day that the Aberdeenshire Council will decide whether or not to grant planning permission not only for the building of two first-class links courses but also a multi-storey hotel and 900 houses/villas/apartments. The following article about Donald Trump (pictured right) appeared in Sunday's issue of "The Observer" and is on "The Guardian Unlimited" website. It makes very interesting reading, especially for those who live in the immediate area.
YOU CAN'T HAVE A GOLF COURSE
WITHOUT THE HOUSES TO PAY
FOR IT, SAYS MEGA-RICH
DONALD TRUMP
By WILL BUCKLEY
First published in "The Observer"
It is a quirk of mega-business that ridiculously successful businessmen never realise the absurdity of their predicament. On and on and on they go, earning more and more and more money without ever pausing to consider whether they might have sufficient unto their needs. This ceaseless accumulation of unnecessary riches would, in a saner society, be seen as neurosis rather than apotheosis, but we live in strange times.
There is something unintentionally comic in all this fruitless striving and the King of Comedy is undoubtedly Donald Trump. Who but The Donald, as first wife Ivana referred to him, would give over an entire floor of the most expensive apartment in New York to housing his one-year-old son Barron, his fifth child but the first by his third wife Melania, and cover it in yellow damask?
Who but The Donald would count among his friends 'Sean C [Connery] and P Diddy'?
Who but The Donald would dedicate a chapter of Trump - The Art of The Comeback to the importance of pre-nuptial agreements, writing: 'I have learned that there is high maintenance and low maintenance. I want no maintenance'?
Who but The Donald would say about Princess Diana: 'I wish I'd had a chance to date her. Her skin was incredible'?
COMIC GENIUS
The man is, unconsciously, a comic genius and to be cherished, except, perhaps, when he starts taking things seriously. Two things are very important to the Trump - golf and his roots (both heir and hair).
'Having access to a golf course and being a good golfer is a huge asset in business and in life,' he says when we talk. 'It allows you to escape the turmoil of life, that's what makes golf so successful and beautiful.'
It also helps one to perfect the art that is the deal. 'I have done many deals on the golf course,' he says. 'You learn a lot about people on the golf course. For me, if I see someone moving the ball then the probability is that they will move the ball in business. If they drop the ball out of their pants... And then there are guys that would never ever think of moving a ball and they are that way in life, too.'
He plays off a handicap of four. 'I had it down to one but it is only going to go up as the clock ticks.'
Desperately keen to avoid The Donald becoming morbid, I ask him how many golf clubs he owns (as in whole shebang, not one iron, two iron, three iron.). 'I have five,' he replies. 'One in LA, which has two-and-a-half miles of ocean front. One in Palm Beach, which is the number-one-rated course in the state of Florida. Then Bedminster, which is built on the estate of John De Lorean and designed by Tom Fazio. Another one in Westchester, NY, and then one on Canouan Island in The Grenadines, which has been voted the best international course anywhere.'
The Los Angeles course ran into difficulties when, due to a combination of faulty plumbing and clunky bulldozers, the 18th hole fell into the Pacific Ocean. 'It cost $264 million, just for the golf course,' says Trump. Not his money, he hastens to add. 'What happened was that it was owned by a family for 70 years and the heirs, as is so often the case, blew it. Fairly big time. They went bankrupt and I was able to buy it from the banks who are friends of mine. Now it's rated higher than Pebble Beach.'
MOST AMBITIOUS
His sixth golf course - the Trump International Golf Links at Balmedie, near Aberdeen - is his most ambitious and is being built in honour of his mother, Mary Trump, who was born in a crofting settlement on the Isle of Lewis.
'I think golf is Scotland's gift to the world,' Trump says. 'You can build golf courses anywhere, but everyone knows that Scotland is the birthplace, not only of my mother, but golf.
'And the two-and-a-half miles of ocean frontage in Scotland. I think it allows me to build what will be the greatest golf course anywhere in the world. That piece of land is absolutely meant for what we are doing.'
Well, yes and no. It is true that golf has probably been played in the dunes for more than five centuries but it is also a site of Special Scientific Interest and one of the top five dune habitats in Britain.
It is not so much the golf course, although as Mickey Foote from Sustainable Aberdeenshire points out: 'He is building an artificial links course on a natural links course.' It is more the 500 private homes, 450-bedroom, 12-storey hotel and almost 1,000 holiday homes.
'What had successfully been popularised as a "golf course" by an extremely slick and media-savvy developer - with the unstinting assistance of a weak and fawning local press - is merely a hook on which to hang the largest residential settlement ever built on protected land,' says Foote. 'Will the last person to sell what remains of unspoiled Aberdeenshire order more cement?'
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds have expressed concern that at least two species might be threatened by the development. A worry that Trump brushes aside with an attempt to make the moral high ground. 'Right now they shoot about 25,000 birds a year [it is currently a country estate],' says Trump. 'Twenty-five thousand birds, that's a lot of birds. The Royal Society of Birds (sic) are against this course, but there won't be any shooting of birds, only birdies and eagles. I walked over the land and there were all these carcasses. I couldn't believe it. Being a non-hunter - I hunt other things, not birds - I can't believe it.'
GATED COMMUNITY
Others, like Foote, can't believe that he seems set on establishing a gated community on such a windswept spot and spoil ing something that was unspoilt.
'We will stabilise the land so the dunes will always be there,' says Trump. 'And environmentally it will be far safer because we are planting Marin grass, which is the native grass.'
Foote is sceptical about 'dune stabilisation', pointing out that they seem to have stayed stable for many millennia without it and looks forward to watching Trump's attempts to grow Marin grass. 'I suppose the birds can always sit on the roof of his hotel to keep warm,' he says. 'That's right, Trump will be doing them a favour.'
His scepticism about Trump as a born-again environmentalist is well-founded.
At present, Trump is offering up portions of his cracker-barrel wisdom on the internet. 'It's not often that I reveal any of my hard-won success secrets for free,' he writes. 'However, today is different.'
And listed at number two on the hard-won secrets is: 'How to understand, respond to and make money from the "Greening of America"! (This ecologically conscious trend is something to seriously consider now... if... you want to profit from it in the coming years.)' Hoisted by his own bracket.
Foote's despondency stems from the fact that it is long odds-on that the planning committee will grant Trump permission to build a course which he claims 'because of the topography of the land will be the best in the world'. A decision that will be welcomed by the majority of locals interested in a quick buck and dismay others who think the last thing Scotland needs is a Ballardian exclusive community, generating profits for a bouffant buffoon.
'I think Trump's job is done,' says Foote. 'He's a celebrity and if he thinks we live in a great place and that makes us feel better. Aberdeenshire is for sale - no reasonable offer refused.'
Foote's anger is not directed at the golf course but the penthouse and pavements that will allow executives to be never more than a buggy ride away from the 1st tee. 'He says it begins and ends with golf,' says Foote, 'but it begins with golf and ends with a housing estate.'
REAL-LIFE MONOPOLY
'It's costing over a billion-and-a-half dollars and you can't pay for that with just a golf club,' says Trump. 'The golf course is the amenity that makes it all work. Frankly, it's the thing I'm most interested in but if we don't have houses or the hotel it doesn't work.'
Trump has endlessly said that money doesn't motivate him, that it merely provides a way of keeping score in his own real-life Monopoly game. 'I don't make deals for the money,' he says regularly. 'I've got enough, much more than I'll ever need. I do it to do it.'
It is apt then that he is pitched against someone with an equal disdain for money, farmer Michael Forbes, who refuses to sell his land to Trump.
'What's the point?' he says of the money offered by The Donald. 'Where could we find to live that is more beautiful than this place?' Forbes does not need money to keep score because he is not interested in playing the game.
In the film Local Hero, the developer succumbs; in Trump's world, the developer rides roughshod over those with the temerity to stand in the way of his vision. 'Scotland will become even more involved in the world of golf as the world of golf becomes more powerful and more influential,' says Trump. 'Sean Connery is my first member, he's a great man, a great guy and a great Scot. I met him at a Dressed to Kilt charity do in New York.'
What can possibly stop someone so well connected. A diversion, perhaps.
'Have you thought about running for President?' I ask.
'People keep asking me to run,' replies The Donald, selfless to a fault.
'You're a registered Democrat [strange but true]. Would you run against Hillary Clinton?'
'She's a very good friend of mine,' says New York's Most Popular. 'I can't run against a friend [small pause]. So is Rudy Giuliani. So I'm pretty well covered.'
Typical property developer, fully insured should anything go wrong.
YOU CAN'T HAVE A GOLF COURSE
WITHOUT THE HOUSES TO PAY
FOR IT, SAYS MEGA-RICH
DONALD TRUMP
By WILL BUCKLEY
First published in "The Observer"
It is a quirk of mega-business that ridiculously successful businessmen never realise the absurdity of their predicament. On and on and on they go, earning more and more and more money without ever pausing to consider whether they might have sufficient unto their needs. This ceaseless accumulation of unnecessary riches would, in a saner society, be seen as neurosis rather than apotheosis, but we live in strange times.
There is something unintentionally comic in all this fruitless striving and the King of Comedy is undoubtedly Donald Trump. Who but The Donald, as first wife Ivana referred to him, would give over an entire floor of the most expensive apartment in New York to housing his one-year-old son Barron, his fifth child but the first by his third wife Melania, and cover it in yellow damask?
Who but The Donald would count among his friends 'Sean C [Connery] and P Diddy'?
Who but The Donald would dedicate a chapter of Trump - The Art of The Comeback to the importance of pre-nuptial agreements, writing: 'I have learned that there is high maintenance and low maintenance. I want no maintenance'?
Who but The Donald would say about Princess Diana: 'I wish I'd had a chance to date her. Her skin was incredible'?
COMIC GENIUS
The man is, unconsciously, a comic genius and to be cherished, except, perhaps, when he starts taking things seriously. Two things are very important to the Trump - golf and his roots (both heir and hair).
'Having access to a golf course and being a good golfer is a huge asset in business and in life,' he says when we talk. 'It allows you to escape the turmoil of life, that's what makes golf so successful and beautiful.'
It also helps one to perfect the art that is the deal. 'I have done many deals on the golf course,' he says. 'You learn a lot about people on the golf course. For me, if I see someone moving the ball then the probability is that they will move the ball in business. If they drop the ball out of their pants... And then there are guys that would never ever think of moving a ball and they are that way in life, too.'
He plays off a handicap of four. 'I had it down to one but it is only going to go up as the clock ticks.'
Desperately keen to avoid The Donald becoming morbid, I ask him how many golf clubs he owns (as in whole shebang, not one iron, two iron, three iron.). 'I have five,' he replies. 'One in LA, which has two-and-a-half miles of ocean front. One in Palm Beach, which is the number-one-rated course in the state of Florida. Then Bedminster, which is built on the estate of John De Lorean and designed by Tom Fazio. Another one in Westchester, NY, and then one on Canouan Island in The Grenadines, which has been voted the best international course anywhere.'
The Los Angeles course ran into difficulties when, due to a combination of faulty plumbing and clunky bulldozers, the 18th hole fell into the Pacific Ocean. 'It cost $264 million, just for the golf course,' says Trump. Not his money, he hastens to add. 'What happened was that it was owned by a family for 70 years and the heirs, as is so often the case, blew it. Fairly big time. They went bankrupt and I was able to buy it from the banks who are friends of mine. Now it's rated higher than Pebble Beach.'
MOST AMBITIOUS
His sixth golf course - the Trump International Golf Links at Balmedie, near Aberdeen - is his most ambitious and is being built in honour of his mother, Mary Trump, who was born in a crofting settlement on the Isle of Lewis.
'I think golf is Scotland's gift to the world,' Trump says. 'You can build golf courses anywhere, but everyone knows that Scotland is the birthplace, not only of my mother, but golf.
'And the two-and-a-half miles of ocean frontage in Scotland. I think it allows me to build what will be the greatest golf course anywhere in the world. That piece of land is absolutely meant for what we are doing.'
Well, yes and no. It is true that golf has probably been played in the dunes for more than five centuries but it is also a site of Special Scientific Interest and one of the top five dune habitats in Britain.
It is not so much the golf course, although as Mickey Foote from Sustainable Aberdeenshire points out: 'He is building an artificial links course on a natural links course.' It is more the 500 private homes, 450-bedroom, 12-storey hotel and almost 1,000 holiday homes.
'What had successfully been popularised as a "golf course" by an extremely slick and media-savvy developer - with the unstinting assistance of a weak and fawning local press - is merely a hook on which to hang the largest residential settlement ever built on protected land,' says Foote. 'Will the last person to sell what remains of unspoiled Aberdeenshire order more cement?'
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds have expressed concern that at least two species might be threatened by the development. A worry that Trump brushes aside with an attempt to make the moral high ground. 'Right now they shoot about 25,000 birds a year [it is currently a country estate],' says Trump. 'Twenty-five thousand birds, that's a lot of birds. The Royal Society of Birds (sic) are against this course, but there won't be any shooting of birds, only birdies and eagles. I walked over the land and there were all these carcasses. I couldn't believe it. Being a non-hunter - I hunt other things, not birds - I can't believe it.'
GATED COMMUNITY
Others, like Foote, can't believe that he seems set on establishing a gated community on such a windswept spot and spoil ing something that was unspoilt.
'We will stabilise the land so the dunes will always be there,' says Trump. 'And environmentally it will be far safer because we are planting Marin grass, which is the native grass.'
Foote is sceptical about 'dune stabilisation', pointing out that they seem to have stayed stable for many millennia without it and looks forward to watching Trump's attempts to grow Marin grass. 'I suppose the birds can always sit on the roof of his hotel to keep warm,' he says. 'That's right, Trump will be doing them a favour.'
His scepticism about Trump as a born-again environmentalist is well-founded.
At present, Trump is offering up portions of his cracker-barrel wisdom on the internet. 'It's not often that I reveal any of my hard-won success secrets for free,' he writes. 'However, today is different.'
And listed at number two on the hard-won secrets is: 'How to understand, respond to and make money from the "Greening of America"! (This ecologically conscious trend is something to seriously consider now... if... you want to profit from it in the coming years.)' Hoisted by his own bracket.
Foote's despondency stems from the fact that it is long odds-on that the planning committee will grant Trump permission to build a course which he claims 'because of the topography of the land will be the best in the world'. A decision that will be welcomed by the majority of locals interested in a quick buck and dismay others who think the last thing Scotland needs is a Ballardian exclusive community, generating profits for a bouffant buffoon.
'I think Trump's job is done,' says Foote. 'He's a celebrity and if he thinks we live in a great place and that makes us feel better. Aberdeenshire is for sale - no reasonable offer refused.'
Foote's anger is not directed at the golf course but the penthouse and pavements that will allow executives to be never more than a buggy ride away from the 1st tee. 'He says it begins and ends with golf,' says Foote, 'but it begins with golf and ends with a housing estate.'
REAL-LIFE MONOPOLY
'It's costing over a billion-and-a-half dollars and you can't pay for that with just a golf club,' says Trump. 'The golf course is the amenity that makes it all work. Frankly, it's the thing I'm most interested in but if we don't have houses or the hotel it doesn't work.'
Trump has endlessly said that money doesn't motivate him, that it merely provides a way of keeping score in his own real-life Monopoly game. 'I don't make deals for the money,' he says regularly. 'I've got enough, much more than I'll ever need. I do it to do it.'
It is apt then that he is pitched against someone with an equal disdain for money, farmer Michael Forbes, who refuses to sell his land to Trump.
'What's the point?' he says of the money offered by The Donald. 'Where could we find to live that is more beautiful than this place?' Forbes does not need money to keep score because he is not interested in playing the game.
In the film Local Hero, the developer succumbs; in Trump's world, the developer rides roughshod over those with the temerity to stand in the way of his vision. 'Scotland will become even more involved in the world of golf as the world of golf becomes more powerful and more influential,' says Trump. 'Sean Connery is my first member, he's a great man, a great guy and a great Scot. I met him at a Dressed to Kilt charity do in New York.'
What can possibly stop someone so well connected. A diversion, perhaps.
'Have you thought about running for President?' I ask.
'People keep asking me to run,' replies The Donald, selfless to a fault.
'You're a registered Democrat [strange but true]. Would you run against Hillary Clinton?'
'She's a very good friend of mine,' says New York's Most Popular. 'I can't run against a friend [small pause]. So is Rudy Giuliani. So I'm pretty well covered.'
Typical property developer, fully insured should anything go wrong.
Labels: Golf Development
posted by Colin |
See story on its own page | Tuesday, November 20, 2007
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