It must be dispiriting at times to be one of the local protesters in Aberdeenshire, on Scotland’s east coast, trying to stop the billionaire Donald Trump from building a $1billion golf complex along one of Scotland’s finest stretches of dunes. His visit to the site recently has reminded them — if they needed it — that they are pitted against one of the world’s most famous and famously ruthless businessmen.
But they should take comfort from the thought that they are not alone. Three thousand miles away, in the rather less rustic location of SoHo in lower Manhattan, a similar battle is being played out between residents and the Trump phenomenon over his plans to construct a $450million condominium. The scheme’s opponents say the 46-storey tower will ruin the low-rise nature of the neighbourhood, in much the same way as Aberdeen’s antagonists rail against the 950 homes and 45-room hotel envisaged for Trump BouleÂvard.
The heartening news for the Scottish campaigners is that Trump’s ambitions in New York have provoked an unusual degree of solidarity between neighbourhoods across the city, who are going to court in an attempt to stop the development. The bad news is that the tycoon has proved uncannily successful in winning over the city government. “He has been very able at ingratiating himself with the city authorities,” said Andrew Berman, director of the historic preservation society for Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.
It’s Trump’s forte, working contacts among the great and the good and using his reputation as a celebrity deal-maker to drive through his designs. He sums up the approach concisely in the title of his forthcoming book, Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (Collins).
It has certainly got him a long way. His background helped: father Fred was a wealthy developer, but most of the elder Trump’s property portfolio was in Brooklyn. Young Donald took the family business over the East river and into the much more brutal real estate market of Manhattan, where he now owns more than 18million square feet of prime space. From there he has taken the Trump empire national — casinos in New Jersey, hotels in Las Vegas and Chicago, golf courses in Florida and Los Angeles — and global, with properties bearing his name in Toronto, Panama City and Dubai.
But his headline successes hide a more complicated picture. For a start, no one can agree on precisely how much he is worth. Business magaÂzine Forbes puts him at $3billion, but every year he disputes the figure, claiming his personal wealth is more than twice that.
“He is clearly a very wealthy man, but just how wealthy has always been unclear,” says his biographer, Gwenda Blair. “Anyone who has sat down and done the math on what is visible knows that he can’t possibly be worth what he says he is.”
Her book, Donald Trump: Master Apprentice (Simon & Schuster), reminds us that he has come close to business extinction on several occasions. What saved him was his ability to turn himself into an international brand that melded his reputed ruthlessness in business with the glamour of his personal life in the penthouse of Trump Tower (worth $50million on its own) and his succession of beautiful wives: Ivana, Marla and Melania. “It’s pretty remarkable, but he has established the Trump brand as someone associated with leading a super-luxury lifestyle.”
But what really sent the value of the Trump brand skyrocketing was the launch of The Apprentice, his leap into television with the famous catchphrase: “You’re fired!” The show is ostensibly about young people competing to work for him, but in reality it is all about Donald Trump.
Mark Lamkin, a former competitor on the show, grew in awe of his sharp side: “He will use every means at his disposal to make his money. If that means pissing off the locals, he has no qualms about it.”
There is a lesson there for the protesters of Aberdeen, as there is in what happened to comic and TV personality Rosie O’Donnell, who criticised him on air and in the fallout was forced from her job as a presenter of talk show The View.
“Trumped, I was,” she writes in her new book, Celebrity Detox (Grand Central Publishing). “I started to see that he was not a man. That human spirit seemed to have gotten lost to a mechanical repetitive meanness, a push-button person with its circuits askew.” — Â