from Sunday Herald, 22 April 2012
“Woah”, said Donald Trump, as he stared at Miss Scotland at a reception to launch his golf course in Aberdeenshire. “She’s beautiful. She may want to work with sales and stuff.”
The apparent willingness to offer a woman a job on the basis of her looks is one of the most revealing moments in a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the controversial US billionaire and reality TV star. For seasoned Trump-watchers, it will come as no surprise.
The 65-year-old man with the world’s most famous toupee surrounds himself with attractive young women. He is co-owner of the organisation that runs Miss Universe, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA beauty contests.
Dubbed “The Donald”, Trump has been married three times, and has five children and four grandchildren. His latest wife, Melania Knauss, to whom he was hitched in 2005, is a former swimwear model from Slovenia. She is 24 years younger than him.
His chosen representative in Scotland, Sarah Malone, is the former “Face of Aberdeen” as a result of a competition in the local evening paper. “I called her,” Trump told a golf magazine. “I said: ‘Do you know anything about golf?’ She said: ‘No.’ So, I said: ‘Good, you’re hired.’”
As the host of the US TV version of ‘The Apprentice’, he more often tells would-be employees that they are fired. He has crafted his public image as a kind of ageing bruiser, who enjoys some serious rough and tumble in the political and business world.
He has suggested that he might be interested as running as a Republican candidate for the US presidency, and has been mooted as a vice-presidential candidate. His persistent questioning of the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s birth certificate earned him a high-profile put-down, when the president publicly roasted him at a televised dinner.
Trump’s business is built on hotels, casinos and other properties, centred in New York and usually bearing his name. He ran into financial difficulties in the 1990s, but it is reported to have recovered since, with the US business magazine, Forbes, estimating his wealth in September 2011 at $2.9 billion (£1.8 bn), though he said it was more.
His sons, Donald Junior and Eric, have recently run into flak after gruesome pictures of them hunting big game in Zimbabwe were posted online. The photographs showed the boys with a slain leopard, a severed elephant’s tail and a dead crocodile hanging from a tree.
In 1988 Donald Trump Senior paid over $11 million (£7m) to host a high-profile boxing match between Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks in Atlantic City. But perhaps his favourite sport is golf, which helps explain why he invests in golf courses, including his much disputed new links at Menie on the Aberdeenshire coast.
He says he wanted to come to Scotland because his mother was born here, in the village of Tong near Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. But it also made good business sense to site a golf course in a country renown for the game.
In making the award-winning film, ‘You’ve Been Trumped’, Anthony Baxter gained an insight in the way in which the man worked. “He’s rather like a spoiled child used to getting his way,” Baxter said.
“I was struck by how he never says 'please' or 'thank you'. In fact I never heard him say those words over the months of making the film and following him at news conferences.”
He pointed out that Trump had publicly expressed scepticism about whether pollution was causing climate change. “I’ve learned in my time of following the tycoon to take everything Trump says with a pinch of salt,” he added. “He knows that if he says things enough times people will believe it, and print it as fact.”
According to Baxter, Trump thinks everything is for sale. In the film he is seen offering a local resident who has opposed him a job, and suggesting that he wants to “get rid” of another’s house. “It's our property,” Trump said. “We can do what we want.”
Those who take on Trump often receive the rough end of his tongue, with the home of one local repeatedly being branded a “pig sty”. Baxter argued that there was a “cultural chasm” between Trump and his Aberdeenshire neighbours who just wanted to lives their lives peacefully.
“The local residents in the film have been branded ‘a national embarrassment for Scotland’ by Donald Trump’s organisation,” he said. “I think they’re an inspiration – and so do the many thousands of people who have seen ‘You’ve Been Trumped’.”
The film is being given a special screening at the Scottish Parliament on Tuesday, hosted by the Green MSP, Patrick Harvie. Then it is due to be shown in cinemas across Scotland to coincide with the scheduled opening of Trump’s golf course in July.
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