Before Running For President, Trump Was Terrorizing Scottish Landowners
Meet the Milnes, Michael Forbes and Vera Coking, three of the little people whose lives were made miserable by trump before he was president.
David and Moira Milne and Forbes owned property on waterfront land near the scenic, environmentally rich dunes in the village of Balmedie, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Trump, however, wanted to build an exclusive golf course and he needed the property owners’ land. He bullied and threatened legal action, but they stood their ground for a while.
Trump ultimately prevailed and his Trump International Golf Links opened in 2012. The club hosted its first big tournament in August 2023 after his course at Turnberry was effectively ruled out of hosting the prestigious Open. Trump bought the Turnberry course in 2014.
For most of her life in Atlantic City, Vera Coking, an elderly widow, ran a neat little boarding house just off the Boardwalk. She raised three children in the house and greeted guests from around the world. Then gambling came to Atlantic City along with the lavish casinos built by rich land barons like trump, who needed Coking’s property to build a parking lot for limousines taking gamblers to his new casino. Coking refused to sell, setting in motion a bitter legal battle and attempt by trump to seize the property through eminent domain.
Scottish Troubles
Trump’s mother emigrated from Scotland to New York in 1930 but her son never showed much interest in visiting, let alone investing in Scotland. That changed in 2008, when trump applied for planning permission to build what he called “the world’s greatest golf course” on an environmentally protected site featuring 4,000-year-old sand dunes. As the years passed, trump went after opponents while winning government support for his plans.
Trump promised to invest $1.25 billion in the development, but the totals came closer to around $50 million. He promised officials that the grand project would generate 6,000 jobs. Recently, it had 95 employees.
Trump’s promises of an eight-story, 450-room luxury hotel never happened. His scheme to build 950 time-share apartments also never materialized. The project did finally include converting an existing manor house into a 16-room boutique hotel. Trump International Golf Links, which opened in 2012, lost $1.36 million in 2015, according to public accounts. In February 2023, the company managing the golf course, Trump International Golf Club Scotland Ltd, reported pre-tax losses of $860,000 in 2021.
Susan and John Munro refused to sell their land and trump tried to bulldoze them into submission by building an almost 15-foot-high earthen wall on two sides of the Munro property, blocking the sweeping view of the rugged Scottish coastline.
Michael Forbes is a quarry worker whose home sits on the opposite side of the trump property. Trump publicly accused Forbes of living “like a pig” and called him a “disgrace” for not selling his “disgusting” and “slum like” home to trump.
The Milnes also held back selling the property and came home from work to find that trump’s workers had planted two rows of trees, and a fence around their garden, blocking the view. Their water and electricity lines were temporarily cut and the Milnes soon received a bill from trump for about $3,500 for the work.
The local landowners’ stories and trump’s attempts to bully them into submission are central to the 2011 feature length documentary, “You’ve Been Trumped.” Director Anthony Baxter demonstrates what happens when a celebrity billionaire tries to run roughshod over pristine, foreign turf and local residents.
The documentary includes interviews with the likes of trump himself, his son Donald Jr., and Green Party politician Martin Ford and chronicled how the Scottish government defied local opposition and fell for trump’s ultimately, unfulfilled promises of boosts in jobs and tourism.
Trump later called the film “boring” and said that Baxter was “a fraud.” The film has won the Hamptons Film Festival Social Justice Award, the Maysles Brothers Award for best documentary at the Denver Film Festival and the Sedona International Film Festival Director’s Choice Award.
Balmedie is bordered by an extensive dune system that stretches 14 miles from Aberdeen to Ythan Estuary at Newburgh. The dunes’ principal vegetation is marram grass and it supports a wide array of wildlife. The village is near the Sands of Forvie Site of Special Scientific Interest, the fifth largest sand dune system in Britain.
In 2007, trump unveiled plans to build two, exclusive golf courses, an upscale complex of 1,500 townhouses and a luxury hotel, all on acres of ecologically unspoiled dunes.
The planning committee at Aberdeenshire Council refused to approve the plans on environmental grounds, concluding the 4,000-year-old ancient dunes a “site of special scientific interest,” (SSSI) or as one official put it, “Scotland’s equivalent of the Amazonian rain forest.”
The Trump Organization then asked the council to order compulsory purchase or eminent domain of some areas of land not in the original planning site.
Alex Salmond, a former first minister of Scotland, overruled the council and approved the plans in 2008, in the “national economic interest.” Salmond later refused to evict residents by eminent domain and announced plans for construction of offshore wind turbines several miles from trump’s golf course. Trump furiously objected and referred to Salmond as “mad Alex” and a “has-been.”
In June 2019, Scottish Natural Heritage ruled that the golf course had “partially destroyed” the sand dune system, causing permanent habitat loss, and the SSSI special status was removed in December 2020.
In 2019, the Scottish government claimed that trump’s family business had refused to pay tens of thousands of pounds in legal fees after the president lost his long legal battle against the eleven-turbine wind farm.
Trump sued to prevent the wind farm from being built in 2012, telling the Scottish Parliament that the turbines would wreck the view from his resort and discourage patronage at the course. Trump told members of parliament that they only had to ask him about concerns over wind turbines.
“I am the evidence,” Trump explained. “I am considered a world-class expert in tourism. When you say, ‘Where is the expert and where is the evidence?’ I say: I am the evidence. I have won many, many awards. If you dot your landscape with these horrible, horrible structures, you will do tremendous damage.”
The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom unanimously dismissed trump’s appeal in 2015. Scotland’s supreme civil court also ruled that Trump International Golf Club Ltd had to pay the legal bills incurred as a result of the 2015 litigation.
“If Scotland doesn’t stop insane policy of obsolete, bird-killing wind turbines, country will be destroyed,” trump tweeted in 2014.
At an inquiry by parliament about renewable energy in 2012, Trump warned that Scotland would get into “serious trouble” if it continued to build wind turbines. Trump threatened to end investing in Scotland if the wind turbines were approved. Though he lost on the turbine challenge, trump bought the prestigious Turnberry resort in Ayrshire in April 2014. The Aberdeenshire Council granted planning approval in October. 2020 for a second golf course on the Balmedie site, to be named the MacLeod Course after trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod.
Then came the 2016 release of the notorious Access Hollywood tape with trump bragging about sexually assaulting women.
Nicola Sturgeon, then first minister of Scotland, called Trump’s comments “deeply abhorrent” and stripped trump of his membership in the Global Scot business network, “a place for Scottish businesses, entrepreneurs and professionals to connect with some of the highly valuable connections and friends Scotland has around the world.”
Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, described trump as a “clay-brained guts, a knotty-pated fool.” And in 2015, Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen annulled trump’s honorary degree after his comments about barring Muslims from entering the United States.
The university noted that “In the course of the current US election campaign (2016), Mr. Trump has made a number of statements that are wholly incompatible with the ethos and values of the university. The university has therefore decided to revoke its award of the honorary degree.”
In 2021, authorities in New York were investigating possible fraud regarding values of trump properties in the U.S. A judge later fined trump $355 million plus interest, finding his company lied for years about wealth on financial statements that were used to secure loans and make deals.
The New York ruling prompted a call for an examination of trump’s funding in Scotland. In November 2021, a court in Scotland ruled that Scottish ministers do not have a “duty” to investigate trump’s purchase of Turnberry Golf Club using an “unexplained wealth order.”
The Trump Organization had always refused to answer questions about its funding for Turnberry Golf Club. The property is one of two golf courses that have lost money, and that trump owns in Scotland, which campaign groups have said are funded with suspicious wealth.
Avaaz, a New York-based campaign group, published a report in 2019 which raised questions about the $60 million trump paid for Turnberry Golf Club. Trump bought the property during a “cash buying spree” when many of the transactions originated from “locations highly conducive to money laundering such as Panama and the former Soviet Union,” Avaaz claimed.
Avaaz submitted evidence that revealed in 2018 alone, the Turnberry club lost nearly $10 million.
Journalist and golf writer James Dodson also claimed that while playing golf with trump’s son Eric in 2013, he was told that Russians were bankrolling the family organization’s golf investments.
“We have pretty much all the money we need from investors in Russia…. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs,” Dodson quoted Eric Trump as saying.
Eric Trump dismissed the reports as “fake news.”
Vera Coking
Closer to home is the story of Vera Coking, whose home was the focus of an eminent domain case filed by trump in the 1990s. It was sold and demolished in 2014.
Coking and her husband bought the property as a summer retreat in 1961 for $20,000. In the 1970s, Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione offered Coking $1 million for her property in order to build the Penthouse Boardwalk Hotel and Casino. She declined the offer, and Guccione started building the hotel-casino in 1978 around the Coking house. Guccione ran out of money in 1980, and construction stopped.
In 1993, trump bought several lots around his casino and hotel, intending to build a parking lot for limousines. Coking refused to sell and the city condemned her house, using the power of eminent domain. She was offered $251,000, a quarter of what she was offered by Guccione 10 years earlier.
Trump defended the use of the legal power known as eminent domain to take property. “Eminent domain is an absolute necessity for a country,” he said. “Without it, you wouldn’t have roads, you wouldn’t have hospitals, you wouldn’t have anything.”
Coking still refused to sell, and trump convinced Atlantic City’s Casino Reinvestment Development Authority to threaten to take the property using eminent domain at a price of $250,000 , a quarter of the price she was offered a decade earlier. Coking fought the ruling and won as Superior Court Judge Richard Williams ruled that because there were “no limits” on what trump could do with the property, the plan to take Coking’s property did not meet the test of law.
Coking remained in her house until 2010, when she moved to a retirement home in the San Francisco Bay Area near her daughter and grandchildren. The property was finally sold for $583,000 in an auction on July 31, 2014. The buyer was Carl Icahn, who held the debt on Trump Entertainment, owner of Trump Plaza. He demolished the house on November 19, 2014.
The adjacent Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino closed in September 2014 for lack of business and was demolished on February 17, 2021.