While Donald Trump gets ready to do whatever Birther skunks do to foul up decent people’s lives, he has been caught up in a renewed and continuing stink in Britain.
The BBC has just broadcast the first TV showing of the film ‘You’ve Been Trumped’. Donald Trump had the lawyers out trying to prevent this being aired but the BBC stood firm.
This is the BBC publicity for the film.
Anthony Baxter's film on the David and Goliath-style conflict between a group of proud Scottish homeowners and American tycoon Donald Trump, as he gets set to build a huge golf resort on an environmentally protected site in Aberdeenshire.
Baxter follows the local residents as they make their last stand in the face of security harassments, legal threats and the loss of their water and electricity supplies. Baxter himself becomes international news after being thrown in jail following an interview with Mr Trump's greenkeeper.
Told entirely without narration, the film captures the cultural chasm between the glamorous, jet-setting and media-savvy Donald Trump and a deeply rooted Scottish community. For the tycoon, the golf course is just another deal, with a possible billion dollar payoff. For the residents, it represents the destruction of a globally unique landscape that has been the backdrop for their lives.
The BBC film critic Mark Kermode
has a blog on this.
The film maker Anthony Baxter could not get support from normal media outlets to make the film so he remortgaged his home to raise the production money.
Writing in The Independent newspaper just before the broadcast he explained how he got involved:
I was astonished to read in Aberdeen’s newspapers the Trump course would ‘put Scotland on the map for golf’ – despite the fact the country is the birthplace of golf, and stuffed full of historic courses, (and needs a new one about as much as Seattle needs another branch of Starbucks).
And then things got more than interesting:
This was clearly a man used to getting his way. And it appeared to me, Mr Trump was determined to flatten anything standing in his path.
Shortly after the bulldozers moved in to destroy the Menie Estate dunes, we discovered Mr Trump’s workers had cut off the water supply to 86-year-old Molly Forbes …. for nearly a week, and so my Producer Richard Phinney and I went to interview Mr Trump’s chief greenkeeper who also doubled as head of building works.
After the interview, Richard and I were both suddenly arrested on the property of another local resident – Susan Munro. We were then driven miles to Aberdeen, banged up in separate prison cells for several hours and stripped of our possessions. DNA, fingerprints and photos were all taken and camera equipment and footage impounded. We were both charged with ‘a breach of the peace’ a criminal offence which you can go to jail for in Scotland.
This caused an international uproar.
And Baxter ends with this comment:
The broadcast of You’ve Been Trumped on BBC Two this Sunday is a landmark event for the families on the Menie Estate. Donald Trump has called You’ve Been Trumped ‘a failure’ and the local residents featured in the film have been branded ‘a national embarrassment for Scotland’. But they have inspired sold out cinema audiences around the world with their extraordinary dignity, and determination to stand up for Scotland’s environment and our planet. These Local Heroes are not impressed or blinded by celebrity, money or power. To them, (and in the immortal words of resident Susan Munro in the film), Donald Trump is just a man with “a bit of a name” and “a few pounds they reckon in his pocket”.
A man with a bit of a name and a few pounds they reckon in his pocket. Not the only person in the news who fits that description perhaps.
