Four years ago, film-maker Anthony Baxter made a documentary about Donald Trump’s corporate behaviour in Scotland that gave people here an idea of how his arrogance and racism feels. But despite being shown to critics and appearing at festivals, his film was buried in a blizzard of legal threats, and never really got publicly shown. Only now has Baxter found a distributor to take it on. In fact, this film is a sequel.
The first film, You’ve Been Trumped in 2012, was about Trump’s breathtaking arrogance in attempting to vandalise a beautiful coastline near Aberdeen to build a golf resort, making all sorts of bland promises on job creation (the sort that he made to US citizens before the presidential election) and finding that the Scottish political establishment was an absolute pushover.
This second film returned in 2016 to find that a local, courageous widow, Molly Forbes, had refused to sell up and believes that Trump’s functionaries had cut off her water supply, to which they had access through neighbouring land they did control. He also put up Mexican-style walls around his property to impose his ugly territorial rule over the troublesome locals. Baxter’s film now looks more urgent than ever: in 2016, he was showing us what Trump rule actually looked like – right here, on our doorstep. Our cultural cringe to him was a mirror to what might happen in the US. Mrs Forbes and her family battle on, in the face of the Trump organisation’s high-handedness and the Scottish political establishment’s supine attitude.
Now that Trump’s poll numbers have weakened and America’s worsening Covid-19 horror has revealed his presidency in all its grotesque incompetence, it seems more relevant than ever to watch Anthony Baxter’s film about the president’s vanity fiefdom in Scotland, supported by our complaisant politicians.
You’ve Been Trumped Too is out on digital platforms from 18 August.
