President Trump broke out his best Scottish brogue while discussing his ancestry and the unveiling of a brand new golf course bearing his family’s name during the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” out now.
The president cut the ribbon for the Trump International Golf Links course in Aberdeen Tuesday, two days after telling Post columnist Miranda Devine about his prolonged fight for zoning approvals that eventually forced him to enlist the help of the late James Bond star Sean Connery.
“I didn’t know him well; I met him one time, but he liked me. I liked him, and he’s a tough kind of a guy, as you probably know,” Trump said of Connery, who died in 2020 at the age of 90.
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“It was very tough zoning, environmentally here to get that approved. And when they approved it, they approved two courses, but I had to start the second one within 10 years from the first. So, if I didn’t start it, let’s say two years ago, we would have lost that right, you’d never get it back,” he went on.
“But Sean Connery, it was very hard getting the zoning because of the environment, and it was very highly protected … and he let out a howl once. He said, ‘Let the bloody bloke build his damn golf courses and let him put money into our country. What’s wrong with you?’” Trump added, deploying his best imitation of “The Untouchables” actor.
“And soon as he said that, the whole thing got approved like so fast. It was crazy,” the president went on. “I called him. I said, ‘Thank you very much.’ I said, ‘You have great power.’ I call him the King of Scotland. So I got to know him a little bit after that. He was great. He was a tough cookie.”
Trump kvetched elsewhere in the podcast about repeatedly running into regulatory issues over environmental concerns — having been confronted with “ugly windmills” visible on the horizon from his Turnberry course.
Trump’s loathing of windmills dates back nearly 20 years, when in 2006, Aberdeen Renewable Energy Group built 11 wind turbines off the shore of the under-construction Trump International Golf Links Aberdeen course.
“With the reckless installation of these monsters, you will single-handedly have done more damage to Scotland than virtually any event in Scottish history,” he fumed in a missive to Scotland’s then-First Minister Alex Salmond.
Trump unsuccessfully tried to stop the construction of the turbines, saying the unsightly windmills ruined the views from the resort, with a court finally ruling against him in 2019.
“A lot of people use the environment to stop projects,” he told Devine, “and I didn’t want that to happen.”
Elsewhere in the interview, the 47th president shared the story of how his mother, born on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, met his father in New York City.
“She was a young girl of about 18 years old, and she came to New York and she hadn’t seen the world, and she met my father, and he was a successful guy, he was a young guy, but he was a successful guy, doing well. He was building houses,” Trump recalled.
“She was a beautiful woman. And he came home that night, he said, ‘I’ve just,’ — to my grandmother, who was a fantastic person, my father’s mother — he said, ‘Well, I just met my wife,’” he said of his then-32-year-old dad.
“My mother was born in Scotland; she loved Scotland. She was a big fan of the Queen [Elizabeth II], I have to tell you. Anytime the Queen was on television, my mother liked watching. She’d say, ‘Oh, the Queen’s on,’” he went on.
While the president’s affinity for Scottish fare didn’t extend to the isle’s famed “black pudding,” Trump did let slip that one of his favorites was “Braveheart,” Mel Gibson’s 1995 epic about the medieval Scottish warrior William Wallace.
“‘Braveheart,’ one of the great movies of all time,” the president said. “But England had a hard time with Scotland. They couldn’t quite tame them.”
