BALMEDIE, Scotland (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump opened a new golf course bearing his name in Scotland on Tuesday, capping a five-day foreign trip designed to promote his family’s luxury properties and play golf.
“Let’s go. 1-2-3,” Trump said before he used a golden pair of scissors to cut a red ribbon and fireworks popped to mark the ceremonial opening of the new Trump course in the village of Balmedie on Scotland’s northern coast.
“This has been an unbelievable development,” Trump said beforehand. He thanked his son Eric for his work on the project, saying it was “truly a labor of love for him.” Son Don Jr. also was present.
Eric Trump said the course was a “passion project” for his father.
Immediately after the opening, Trump, Eric Trump and two professional golfers teed off on the first hole. Trump rarely allows the news media to watch his golf game, though video journalists and photographers often find him along the course wherever he plays. Trump planned to play 18 holes before he arrives back in Washington on Tuesday night.
The overseas jaunt let Trump escape Washington’s sweaty summer heat and humidity while questions about the case of Jeffrey Epstein followed him across the Atlantic Ocean. But it added to a lengthy list of ways the Republican president has used the White House to promote his brand.
Billing itself as the “Greatest 36 Holes in Golf,” the Trump International Golf Links, Scotland, was designed by Eric Trump. The course is hosting a PGA Seniors Championship event later this week before it begins offering rounds to the public on Aug. 13. Signs promoting the event were seen all around the course on Tuesday, while temporary signage on the highway 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 as part of the security procedures for Trump’s arrival.
The day combined two things close to Trump’s heart: golf and Scotland. His mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was born on the Isle of Lewis and eventually went to New York. She died in 2000 at age 88.
“My mother loved Scotland,” Trump said Monday during a meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at another of his golf courses, Turnberry, on Scotland’s southern coast. “It’s different when your mother was born here.”
He appeared to be in such a good mood that he even praised the throng of journalist who had assembled to cover the event, saying there was no “fake news” on the course.
“I didn’t use the word ‘fake news’ one time, not one time,” Trump said.
Trump worked some official business into the trip by holding talks with Starmer and reaching 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 settled. But the trip has featured a lot of golf, and the presidential 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 around the new course are towering wind turbines lining the coast, part of a nearby windfarm Trump sued to try to block construction of in 2013.
He lost the 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, 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.”
Superville reported from Washington.
