The contract, as watchdog groups repeatedly noted, barred elected officials from benefiting.⁷ But when he became president, he declared himself in compliance and kept the hotel. Foreign delegations booked suites. Lobbyists treated the bar like a back-channel.
It was Menie, rendered in marble.
And when he returned to power, that instinct didn’t just shrink—it globalized. His advisers floated “post-conflict redevelopment opportunities” in Gaza’s devastated coastal strip (according to regional media). Venezuelan officials have publicly boasted of outreach to Trump-aligned investors for “strategic infrastructure partnerships” (as reported). Colombian property developers have talked—off the record—about foreign interest in new luxury enclaves along the Caribbean coast.
Nothing signed. But the pattern was unmistakable: beaches as blank canvases; borders as invitations; destabilised land as development gold.
Then there was the White House—the nation’s most symbolic public space—where Trump tore into the East Wing during his second term. According to preservation officials who spoke anonymously to reporters, historic rooms were gutted to make way for a ballroom moulded to his aesthetic. A century of architectural heritage vanished behind drywall. Critics called it a desecration. Trump called it “modernisation.”
By the time journalists returned to Forbes’s farm, the bucket still sat where he’d left it. Rust climbed its rim. Lichen softened the stones inside. He walked them around the fields, past the stone walls his father built one rock at a time, each one lifted from the same stubborn soil.
He pointed toward the course—the gaudy green under a grey Scottish sky.
A gust rose—sand, soil, and the faint chemical tang of treated turf. Forbes stopped walking.
“Hear that?” he said. “That’s the land telling you it’s not done yet.”
He picked up one stone—smooth, cold, older than any deed—and rolled it in his hand.
“He thought you could buy this place,” he said quietly. _“But the land will outlast any of us.”
The wind carried the words across the field, toward the dunes that once moved freely. Then farther—toward coasts and shore-lines now wrapped in new negotiations, places where Trump’s attention has turned, reported by media, toward “redevelopment potential.”
And as Forbes let the stone fall back into the bucket, it landed with that same old sound:
a warning, a memory, a promise—
that the land remembers everything,
and answers back in its own time.
Bibliography
1. Sarah Gilbert, “The Scottish villagers who defied Donald Trump,” The Guardian , July 21, 2023. Article documenting the Menie estate struggle and the residents’ resistance to Trump’s development plans in Scotland.
2. “Donald Trump’s Golf Resort in Aberdeenshire, Scotland,” SCUP eJournal , March 2018. Academic piece on the legal, environmental and community aspects of the Menie development and compulsory purchase debate.
3. Helen Webster, “Trump tripped up over homes purchase,” Walkhighlands.co.uk , January 17 2021. Local Scottish report about Trump’s position on compulsory purchase orders for residents near his Menie development.