BALMEDIE, Scotland — Michael Forbes has been at odds with President Donald Trump since the day Trump turned up with a plan to build a golf resort next to his farm on Scotland’s northeast coast. That was nearly 20 years ago, and Forbes, a retired quarry worker and salmon fisherman, hasn’t lost any of his vinegar.
“There’s no way I’m ever going to sell,” Forbes, 73, said this week of his property, which is surrounded by a new golf course that Trump is expected to dedicate when he visits his two resorts in Scotland this week. “I keep three Highland cows behind the house,” Forbes said, chuckling that the bucolic spectacle annoys his neighbor, clashing with his manicured landscape.
Such cussedness comes naturally on this wild stretch of the Scottish coast, where the North Sea winds can snap a full-grown spruce tree in two. But it captures a wider refusal among many Scots to make peace with Trump, even after he regained the White House and deepened his investment in Scotland — a token of his ties to the land where his mother was born.
“Everyone in Scotland hates him,” Forbes said, a claim that was thrown in doubt a few minutes later by John Duncan, a nearby contractor who clears ditches for Trump. “I love the man,” Duncan said, noting that the president’s resort, Trump International Scotland, employs 35 greenskeepers alone.
Duncan likened Trump to Nigel Farage, the populist leader of the anti-immigrant party Reform U.K., and said Britain would benefit from their brand of take-no-prisoners leadership. Still, he conceded, “There’s folks who don’t like Donald Trump, and nothing is ever going to change that.”
The police in Scotland are bracing for demonstrations against Trump during his visit, which will include a weekend at his other Scottish resort, Trump Turnberry, on the west coast about 50 miles from Glasgow. A survey in February by the market research firm Ipsos found that 71% of those polled in Scotland had an unfavorable opinion of Trump, compared with 57% of the broader British public polled.
Some of this antipathy may reflect his turbulent history in Scotland, which has been marked by feuds with noncompliant neighbors, breakups with political officials over his business plans, and long-standing grudges, like Trump’s hostility toward the offshore windmills that turn lazily within sight of his guests in Aberdeenshire.
The common thread is a belief that Trump never delivered on the promises he made in 2006 when he bought the Menie estate, 8 miles north of Aberdeen. Trump talked about putting up a sprawling hotel to supplement the manor house already there, as well as hundreds of vacation homes. With a total investment projected at 150 million pounds ($202 million), it would have created hundreds of jobs.
None of that happened, though the second golf course at the resort in Aberdeenshire, which Trump will dedicate this week, is evidence that the Trumps are still pouring money into the project. The resort reported losses of 1.4 million pounds ($1.9 million) in 2023, according to a financial filing. It is listed as having an asset value of 37 million pounds ($49 million) and 84 employees.
“President Trump is proud of his Scottish heritage and roots,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement. Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was a native of Lewis, in Scotland’s western isles.
“He has created projects that have a positive economic impact,” Cheung said, “generating good jobs and boosting economic activity in the area.”
There is no dispute that the resort has injected some money into a region that depends on its ties to the North Sea oil industry. Trump alluded to that when he told the BBC last week that he planned to meet Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain in Aberdeen, which he called the “oil capital of Europe.”
“They should get rid of the windmills and bring back the oil,” said Trump, who fought for years to block the installation of the wind farm off the resort’s coast.
“Windmills,” he said, “are really detrimental to the beauty of Scotland.”
Analysts said Trump had the dynamics of the two industries backward. Oil production in the North Sea has declined steadily for the past 20 years, while offshore wind is one of Britain’s fastest-growing industries.
“Trump’s thinking would have been way more credible in the 1980s than it is now,” said Tessa Khan, the executive director of Uplift, a research group that campaigns for the transition away from fossil fuels.
Trump’s history with Turnberry is far less contentious than that with Aberdeen. Turnberry was a faded dowager when he bought it in 2014, and he is credited with restoring the luster of its three courses. But it, too, has become a target: A pro-Palestinian activist group recently painted the slogan “Gaza is not 4 Sale” on the grounds, prompting calls from Trump to Starmer.
During his first term, Trump lobbied the Scottish government to award the coveted British Open golf tournament to Turnberry, which has not played host since 2009, before he owned it. The R&A, a golf association in St. Andrews that runs the tournament, has signaled a greater openness to going back to Turnberry but said its lack of hotel rooms and transport links was a hurdle.
In Aberdeenshire, the tensions are environmental. The links there are carved between sand dunes, which were designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest because of the way they shift over time. A plaque behind the clubhouse, next to a vendor selling Trump Grab & Go sandwiches, declared that the dunes help make it “the greatest golf course anywhere in the world!” But Scottish authorities withdrew the scientific site designation in 2020, saying the construction of the links had deprived the dunes of their special character.
As technical as that might seem, it has registered with locals, who are proud of the dunes and relish walking among them. On a recent evening at the Cock and Bull restaurant, across the road from the resort, two men could be overheard discussing Trump and the dunes’ lost “SSSI status.”
Not everybody is nursing grievances. Anas Sarwar, the leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, wrote this spring in The Times of London that “President Trump’s affinity for Scotland is real, regardless of what people think of his politics.” He said Scotland’s first minister, John Swinney, leader of the Scottish National Party, had mismanaged his relationship with the president.
A few days before last year’s U.S. election, Swinney endorsed the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris. He and Trump are still expected to meet during the president’s visit.
Even Trump’s most implacable foes recognize there are limits to the feuding. David Milne, who lives in a converted coast guard lookout bordering the Aberdeenshire resort, spent years theatrically protesting his neighbor. He flew the Mexican flag above his house in 2016, when Trump vowed to build a wall on the southern U.S. border.
Milne’s views on Trump have not softened any more than those of Forbes, with his Highland cows. Milne, too, said he had no plans to sell his house, which Trump once called “ugly.” But he has had no run-ins with the resort for years, he said, and has no plans to fly his Mexican flag when Trump is in residence next week.
“Once the Mexican people told him where to go, there didn’t seem to be any point,” Milne said. “They’re quite capable of taking care of themselves.”