Anthony Baxter on Trump's Scottish promises
Donald Trump was elected US President on promises of job creation and prosperity. Anthony Baxter, director of You’ve Been Trumped and its sequel, You’ve Been Trumped Too, has heard those promises somewhere before
On 20 January 2017, orange business tycoon and reality TV star Donald J Trump will take his seat in the White House Oval Office as the 45th President of the United States of America. His campaign slogan – half-inched from Ronald Reagan – was "Making America Great Again".
The American voters bought Trump’s promises hook, line, and sinker, overlooking his misogyny, racism, bullying, suspicious financial dealings, sexual misconduct, inability to conjugate a coherent sentence, and complete lack of experience in politics in the belief that this “successful” businessman would bring them, their family and their community prosperity. Filmmaker Anthony Baxter has seen a similar pattern before.
When we speak to the Montrose filmmaker down the line from New York it's less than two weeks to the US election. He takes us back to 2006, when Trump began building what was to be, according to the now president-elect, “the world’s greatest golf course”.
“In Scotland, he came and was welcomed by politicians and the Scottish government as you’ll remember,” says Baxter. “He was seen as a saviour for the area. People were saying, ‘Oh well, North Sea oil won’t last forever but that doesn’t matter, we’ve got Trump.’”
As Baxter’s 2011 film You’ve Been Trumped and its sequel, You’ve Been Trumped Too, show, these promises never came to fruition. “What we try and do with the new film is show the story in Scotland, show the American voters that here is an example of how Trump came into an area and promised so much and delivered so little.” His promises included 6000 jobs, but he delivered just 95, most low paid or part-time. “His golf course is losing millions of pounds,” adds Baxter, “and has none of the economic benefits that were promised.”
Like in the first film, You’ve Been Trumped Too focuses in on the local residents of the Menie Estate, a once-protected section of the Aberdeenshire coastline that was flattened to make way for Trump’s links. We see how these humble, hardworking people's lives have been made an utter misery by the shredded wheat-haired billionaire.
“There’s Molly Forbes,” says Baxter, “who’s now 92 years old, who’s spent all these years without a proper reliable water supply because Trump’s workers cut off her supply back in 2010 and they failed to fix it properly.” In Baxter’s film we see Molly having to scramble buckets of water from a nearby burn to wash her dishes. Later, her son Michael tells this to some delegates at a Trump convention. Their bizarre response is to say that “the American people have had it much worse under the Obama administration.”
For Baxter, the Forbes’ and their neighbours’ experience of Trump should be sending up red flags to the people of America. “Following Michael and Molly and following their plight has been a kind of microcosm of what would be unleashed on the United States if Trump ever became president,” reckons the filmmaker.
Since our conversation with Baxter, of course, Trump has done just that. Let’s hope his promises to the American people mean more to him than his promises to the people of Aberdeenshire.