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BALMEDIE: President Donald Trump is opening a new golf course bearing his name in Scotland on Tuesday, capping a five-day foreign trip designed around promoting his family's luxury properties and playing golf.
Trump and his sons, Eric and Donald Jr., are cutting the ceremonial ribbon and playing the first-ever round at the new Trump course in the village of Balmedie, on the northern coast of Scotland.
The overseas jaunt let Trump escape Washington’s sweaty summer humidity and the still-raging scandal over the files related to Jeffrey Epstein.
It was mostly built around golf — and walking the new course before it officially begins offering rounds to the public on Aug. 13, adding to a lengthy list of ways Trump has used the White House to promote his brand.
Billing itself the “Greatest 36 Holes in Golf,” the Trump International Golf Links, Scotland, course is hosting a PGA Seniors Championship event this week, after Trump leaves. Signs promoting the event had already been erected all over the course before he arrived on Tuesday, and, on the highway leading in, temporary metal signs guided drivers onto the correct road.
Golfers hitting the course at dawn as part of that event had to put their clubs through metal detectors erected as part of the security sweeps ahead of Trump's arrival.
Also from Scotland's north is the president's late mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, who was born on the Isle of Lewis, immigrated to New York and died in 2000 at age 88.
“My mother loved Scotland,” Trump said during a meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday at another one of his golf courses, Turnberry, on Scotland's southern coast. “It's different when your mother was born here.”
Trump used his trip to meet with Starmer and reach a trade framework for tariffs between the U.S. and the European Union’s 27 member countries — though scores of key details remain to be hammered out. But the trip has featured a lot of golf, and having the president visit is sure to raise the new course's profile.
Trump’s assets are in a trust, and his sons are running the family business while he’s in the White House. Any business generated at the course will ultimately enrich the president when he leaves office, though.
Visible from various parts of the new course were towering windmills lining the coast — some with blades that showed visible dots of rust. They are part of a nearby windfarm that Trump sued to block construction of in 2013.
He lost that case and was eventually ordered to pay legal costs for bringing it — and the issue still enrages him. During the meeting with Starmer, Trump called windmills “ugly monsters” and suggested they were part of “the most expensive form of energy.”
“I restricted windmills in the United States because they also kill all your birds,” Trump said. “If you shoot a bald eagle in the United States, they put you in jail for five years. And windmills knock out hundreds of them. They don’t do anything. Explain that.”
Starmer said in the U.K, “we believe in a mix” of energy, including oil and gas and renewables.
The new golf course will be the third owned by the Trump Organization in Scotland. Trump bought Turnberry in 2014 and owns another course near Aberdeen that opened in 2012.
Trump golfed at Turnberry on Saturday as protesters took to the streets, and on Sunday. He invited Starmer, who famously doesn’t golf, aboard Air Force One so the prime minister could get a private tour of his Aberdeen properties before Tuesday’s ceremonial opening.
“Even if you play badly, it’s still good,” Trump said of golfing on his course over the weekend. “If you had a bad day on the golf course, it’s OK. It’s better than other days.”
Trump also found time to to praise Turnberry's renovated ballroom, which he said he'd paid lavishly to upgrade — even suggesting that he might install one like it at the White House.
“I could take this one, drop it right down there," Trump joked. “And it would be beautiful.”