Triumphant Trump wants second golf links on Scotland's wild coastline

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/feb/16/trump-golf-links-coastline


Donald Trump playing on his Trump International course in 2011. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

A few more years must yet elapse before we can properly test Donald Trump's claim that he has built the finest golf course in the world, though he has certainly built the most inclusive.

The Trump International Golf Links, just north of Aberdeen, on the anointed and golden Menie coastline, treats both sexes equally. That raises it beyond many of Scotland's other elite courses, where women must be kept on a leash and the committee last saw action at Balaclava. It even tolerates the bottom feeders in a sport that was born with a Trespassers Will Be Shot sign around its neck. At each of Trump International's holes there are six tee boxes ranging from "professional" to "barely ambulant".

A walk across the links is to encounter a landscape rendered ethereal by the huge dunes that loom above every hole. The 18th is a 630-yard behemoth where an unspoilt view of three miles of beach stretching back towards Aberdeen will soften the mood of those who will have suffered a pestilence of lost balls.

Trump, the billionaire American property developer is, very possibly, the only man God has created who does not possess the embarrassment gene. Whether it's making or losing fortunes on luxury developments that are the tartan trews of property constructions or calling for President Obama to show us his birth certificate, he is the embodiment of indomitable. When it was revealed last week that he was seeking planning permission for a second golf course, to the south of the current one, it seemed, on the face of it, that his dream of creating a sprawling millionaires' "Trumpland" resort would be fulfilled. Trump triumphant in fact.