Donald Trump 'hoodwinked' Scotland over '1bn pounds golf resort' claims former aide

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

Source: Irish Star (09:39 ET, MAR 29 2024)

Neil Hobday, the man who helped secure a deal for Donald Trump's first Scottish golf resort, has claimed the nation was "hoodwinked" over the supposed £1bn project.

Hobday worked as the project director for Trump's controversial course, which is located in Aberdeenshire. The former president pledged to invest £1bn into the development, which opened in 2012. But Mr Hobday has claimed Trump has failed to keep up with his side of the bargain.

Trump International Scotland claimed to have "delivered on its promise to build one of the greatest modern links golf courses of all time". They added that they have invested "hundreds of millions of pounds" into the economy. But Mr Hobday, who resigned from his post in 2010, has said he felt "hoodwinked and ashamed that I fell for it", reports the Daily Record.

Speaking on Trumped, a BBC Sounds podcast, he said: "I don't think even if he could raise the money to build the whole thing out, he wanted the golf course and that was it. He was willing to fight the environmental battle and create this impression that this was a $1bn project and Scotland absolutely needed it. But I think he never really had the money or the intention of finishing it. He continued, "I feel very hoodwinked and ashamed that I fell for it and Scotland fell for it. We all fell for it. He was never going to do it. "

Read more: https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/donald-trump-hoodwinked-scotland-over-32470630?int_source=mantis_rec&int_medium=web&int_campaign=more_like_this

---

"He was never going to do it." That pretty much sum up TFG's approach to everything. He lies. And everyone who believes him gets stuck holding the bag. Or dies, if you consider all the lies he told during the pandemic. "When summer comes it will disappear -- like magic..."

[Novara]

1. Hey, here's an idea! How about suing him for fraud?

I know, a novel approach, right?!?

[Kennah]

2. Installment #27 in the novel series

[Botany]

3. He promised thousands of jobs too

Scotland should seize the golf course and restore the native dune communities.

[Old Crank]

18. Exactly

My feelings about it. Re-wilding is big in England. Then slap liens for the costs on all his properties.

[Botany]

38. Scotland has plenty of golf courses but a limited # of places for coastal dune communities

Besides dunes are made to move. Restore the lands back into the native ecosystems, use the hotel
and club house as home for scientists and students to work on rewilding and climate change, and
have hiking paths around the grounds with places where people can watch the critters and the stars.
Scotland can use some of the billions it is bringing in from oil and give Donny his money back then
tell him to piss off. The man promised thousands of jobs from that golf course and the real # is less
than 100 with more than 1/2 being caddy jobs.

[calimary]

21. THIS!!! SEIZE it.

Fuck the fucking golf course! How about a nature preserve instead? Help and restore the ecosystem. NO DEVELOPMENT. Florida: Leave it alone to go back to nature. To heal your soul after donald raped your land.

[Ocelot II]

4. Of course he did. Hoodwinking is how he rolls, always.

[GreenWave]

5. He should be sentenced to a lifetime of hearing bagpipe apprentices.

[machoneman]

7. And eating haggis for breakfast, lunch and dinner, 24/7/365!

[MuseRider]

10. I would be more than happy

to crank up my small pipes. Yes smaller and not as loud but boy oh boy can they be obnoxious especially by someone who has no idea how to play them yet. Highland pipes, smaller but just as obnoxious.

[Mr.Bill]

14. The only good thing about bagpipes

is if you throw them into the fireplace they will burn.

And seriously, when was it decided that all cop funerals be bagpipe festivals?

[MuseRider]

16. LOL

For some reason I LOVE them. From the time I was a little kid I have wanted to learn them. I was so angry when I found out you could not play them in 4th grade band or any band after!!!! Now that I had to retire from my years in the Symphony because I can no longer blow well enough to be good I can do Small Pipes, a gift from a sadly dead Symphony friend. You would like them better, not as loud and they are bellows blown. Actually they would not annoy him so forget it, back to the wonderful but yes, likely annoying Bag Pipes. Let him have it and make one really obnoxious song one played over and over and over.

[Turbineguy]

22. Bagpipes make

music to choke Nazi's by.

[Ocelot II]

27. I love bagpipes!

[SergeStorms]

29. Maybe.....

if you stopped crushing them in your arms they'd stop screaming.

Just a thought.

[MuseRider]

33. LOL!

They would.

[chowder66]

11. Lol. At first I was like hey! wait a minute but then "apprentices" registered.

[Tesha]

6. Can we just say 'he lied' now?

Hoodwinked sound so precious - it’s not, and if he made promises he hasn’t kept…take his ass to court!

[TNNurse]

9. I agree, I am sick of polite euphemisms. .

[Permanut]

24. That's a little harsh .

Kellyanne Conway called them "alternative facts".

[SergeStorms]

31. "Take his ass to court"

The cemeteries are littered with the graves of people who said, "I'm going to take that bastard to court!"

[Blue Owl]

8. Works of the noble, holy bible salesman

[CommonOkie]

12. 13 cars

Visitor parking has 13 vehicles all 11 passenger SUV's 143 golfers. Busier than 6 Flags, Disney even Broadway.

[chowder66]

13. No "Scotland didn't fall for it". Those looking to make a buck did.

Donald Trump will be greeted by at least two Mexican flags, placed near his Aberdeenshire golf course in Scotland, when he visits the country later this week.
It’s a symbolic reminder of those he’s offended locally and internationally and a sign that the presumptive Republican U.S. presidential nominee should not expect a warm welcome after years-long contention surrounding the links, locals say.

“He’s notoriously disliked here,” said Stan Blackley, an Edinburgh resident who famously rubbed a yellow balloon on Trump’s head in 2012. “When he comes, we can almost feel the hair up the spine of Scotland stand up.”

Blackley, a 46-year-old environmental campaigner, is one of many who oppose the real estate tycoon’s presence in Scotland. Almost 600,000 people earlier this year signed a petition calling for Trump to be banned from entering the U.K. Many of the signatures came from Scotland, according to The Atlantic.

https://time.com/4378489/donald-trump-scotland/

[muriel_volestrangler]

20. Sadly, he was given planning permission for a 2nd course in 2020, and work started in 2023

The Scottish government were hoodwinked. Here's the podcast:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0hmlm50

At around 20 minutes (just after Hobday says the bit about "hoodwinked" ), the First Minister of Scotland when the first course was approved, Alex Salmond, agrees ("in retrospect" ), and says "as this story wended on, and I lost confidence in the willingness of the Trump Organization to fulfil the investments" they got "a range of excuses".

Paul Cheshire, Professor of Economic Geography at the LSE, then says he was "really surprised that canny Scottish national politicians were bamboozled by the bluff that constituted the planning proposal and its economic forecasts. There was never any chance of them coming to fruition". He says "worse than hoodwinked - they were almost culpable ... it was blindingly obvious it was a huge overestimate".

Bonus: at the start of the podcast, Trump gets an "award" from Joe Cinque, convicted felon and mobster, and the "academy" on whose board of trustees Trump sat, but "didn't know".

How a convicted felon nicknamed ‘Joey No Socks’ covered Donald Trump in stars

Trump indicated he didn’t know much about the academy’s board of trustees — on which he, two of his sons and multiple members of his organizations have served. He also claimed he doesn’t know Cinque well.
...
In an angry email response, academy attorney Andrew Langsam threatened Yahoo News with legal action if it were to discuss decades-old news reports detailing accusations about the academy’s ratings practices, Cinque’s criminal record and his alleged ties to the mob.
...
The Star Diamond awards are sleek, metallic and festooned with stars – almost a perfect manifestation of the Trump aesthetic. Indeed, up until last year, some of the plaques given to Star Diamond recipients prominently featured Trump’s signature. As the “Ambassador Extraordinaire,” Trump signed the awards with two other top board members, Cinque and travel agent Bill Fischer.
...
“Joseph Cinque, President of The AAHS, has been attending Mr. Trump’s party for the past 16 years,” the article said. “It is somewhat of a new Years Eve tradition for him and of course, he has become dear friends with the Trump family.”

Cinque presented Trump with a Star Diamond “lifetime achievement award” at that bash. The article features multiple photos of Cinque beaming alongside Trump and his family. Trump regularly has Cinque present him with awards at his events. Multiple photos on the academy site show Trump proudly awarding and receiving Star Diamond plaques. An academy promotional video features a clip of Trump, one of his buildings and a shot of Cinque standing in front of one of Trump’s private planes.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-a-convicted-felon-nicknamed-joey-no-socks-153029052.html

[chowder66]

35. The government may have but the people that lived there and nearby didn't.

That was my point. They raged against him and the plans. They hate the guy.

[Emrys]

37. Salmond was a sucker for rich influential assholes.

He palled around with Trump (until their relationship soured, for Trump because of his obsessive opposition to windfarms, for Salmond because Trump's grandiose promises never materialized), and palled around with Rupert Murdoch. To be somewhat fair, Salmond's predecessor as First Minister, Labour's Jack McConnell, was also taken in by Trump.

As a politician Salmond had some virtues, but they were always soured by his missteps and blind spots.

His enthusiasm for Trump's initial golfing development isn't hard to explain. Aberdeen won't be an oil and gas capital for ever, and even currently their benefits are thinly spread for locals. Trump bought off the local media (the Aberdeen Press and Journal even gave him a weekly column at one point) and some councillors, so even if he'd been inclined to do so, Salmond would have had a hard time opposing what appeared to be a financial bonanza for the area not far from his constituency.

Trump's original plan was for two golf courses to be built in succession, so the more recent development was covered by the original planning permissions. The financial viability of the project didn't hinge on the golf courses themselves, which were more of a vanity hook for Trump, as all his courses are, but on the housing developments associated with them. Early on, he wasn't even able to build a decent clubhouse for the Menie course, golfers initially having to manage with a glorified windblown marquee, though he finally put up a typically tacky permanent structure which one local councillor, to the wrath of Trump's enforcer thugs, complained resembled "a Victorian lunatic asylum".

A pal of mine in planning up there told me back in 2016 that there was no way there'd be any profit from the developments without the accommodation side, and that's the main area Trump's failed to fulfil. Trump at one point blamed financial issues as a result of the 2008 crash for this (he's certainly obsessed about windfarms, but some of his noise about them was seen as cover for his lack of funding), evidently before he found that Russia's mafia was apparently relatively unaffected by it and could offer sustained richer pickings in return for doing its bidding.

Given recent financial setbacks in the Trump household and the blows to the Trump brand, it'll be interesting to see how the second course (named MacLeod after his sainted mother) and the rest of the development fare. His Turnberry course in southwest Scotland lost any prospects of hosting international tournaments after some of his racist actions and outbursts while president. But construction/destruction is continuing apace at the moment.

[ejbr]

15. What kind of clown

jeopardizes their country's money without doing minimal research on who you are doing business with? Hoodwinked? No, you f'd up.

[Lithos]

17. Trump just said to Scotland - I will respect you in the morning

We all know what happens in that case.

[Mr. Evil]

19. When summer comes,

I hope HE will disappear... like magic.

[dlk]

23. Trump is the quintessential used car salesman

Chicklets teeth and all. He’s the personification of the old lawyers joke. How can you tell if he’s lying? His lips are moving

It’s astounding how long it takes for people to catch on to his many scams and grifts

As P. T. Barnum was credited with saying, “There ‘s a sucker born every minute.” Sadly, there’s a large percentage of his supporters who will never wise up, either by choice or just plain ignorance.

[elleng]

25. Sure surprised me they'd fall for it.

[RainCaster]

26. How about NY siezes this first?

They can sell it back to the people of Scotland for a reasonable price. TSF would be banned for life.
Everybody wins.

[Wonder Why]

28. Thoughts and prayers for another sucker.

[Orrex]

30. Hard to have sympathy for anyone who buys his sales pitch

He's been an obvious grifter for at least five decades, so anyone who falls for the con at this point should really know better.

[SergeStorms]

32. I imagine Donald....

is club champion at these golf courses as well.

Why he was never on the PGA Tour is a mystery to me.

[EarthFirst]

34. His business tactics have been on display for decades...

I have no sympathy for those who are unwilling to engage in due diligence required before laying down with Trump.

It would take almost no effort to realize that this was not in the best interest of your constituents to engage a business deal with TSF…

[twodogsbarking]

36. Screwing people is his specialty. He is an expert.

[Aussie105]

39. But this is how Trump always operates?

You come up with a big project, promise to finance it, and get other parties involved.
You then back off, and let the other parties pick up the costs.

The 'project' may be a golf course or an Insurrection, but the method is the same.