You’ve Been Trumped and You’ve Been Trumped, Too documentaries review: Donald Trump is no friend to “the little people”

Remember back in June, when Donald Trump flew into Scotland on the day after the Brexit vote to promote his golf resort and congratulated the Scots on voting to leave the EU? (Scotland overwhelming voted Remain.) That golf course, Turnberry on the western Scottish coast, isn’t Trump’s only tiny-ball project in the country: He’s also got Trump International Golf Links on the east coast, north of Aberdeen. Both resorts have been a financial disaster for the guy who keeps insisting he’s such a fantastic businessman, the best businessman — so far, he’s lost almost £26 million on both resorts, and he’s not done pouring money into them yet. (Sad. Hemorrhaging money on golf courses in Scotland? Loser!) But Golf Links has been an even bigger disaster for the people who had the temerity to be living on the land that Trump wanted before he got there. And theirs is the story British documentarian Anthony Baxter tells in his entertaining yet enraging 2012 film You’ve Been Trumped.

Trump’s behavior in Aberdeenshire, as documented by Baxter, is a microcosm of Trump’s awfulness overall. He somehow swindled and/or seduced the local and national governments into approving a resort scheme that destroyed a rare wilderness area on the North Sea coast: the shifting of the dunes were being used in a unique global-warming study, but those dunes were bulldozed: watch it happening here, and weep. The area was “the only wild stretch of land” readily accessible to people in Aberdeen who wanted to escape the city for a while, and now it’s ruined. And of course, the local wildlife has been badly impacted. So the project has been bad for animals, bad for people, and bad for science. But hey, listen to Donald Trump Jr. declaiming that this golf course “will be etched” into these lands “forever,” like that’s a good thing. This is the Trump idea of legacy and heritage: manufactured and manicured greens off limits to everyone but paying customers. They’ve trashed nature, remade it in their own image, and are charging admission.

But that’s only the background to Baxter’s story. Even before construction began, Trump and his machine started harassing locals who wouldn’t sell up. Oh, it’s not that Trump wanted to build on their land; Trump just didn’t want the guests in his hotel and timeshare residences having to suffer the trauma of looking out their windows and seeing the “disgusting” “slumlike” residences of locals nearby. “He lives like a pig,” Trump said publicly about farmer Michael Forbes’s land, which is a working farm: there’s nothing “slumlike” or “disgusting” about it, except, perhaps, to a man who has never done a day of physical labor in his life and doesn’t even know what that would look like.

What’s disgusting here is Trump’s outrageous public abuse of the local people and the local culture (with the full complicity of the governments meant to be representing and protecting their citizens). What’s disgusting here is how Trump’s construction crews cut off the pipes that feed the wells that supply water to Forbes and others in the area, including his elderly mother, Molly, who also lives nearby and also has refused to sell. What’s disgusting here is how the local police have become enforcers for Trump: Baxter and his producer and cowriter, Richard Phinney, are subjected to intimidation and arrest — footage of this appears in the film — merely for asking questions about when the Forbeses’ water might be reconnected.

The sharp personalities and cheerful stubbornness of Michael, Molly, and the other locals is a bit of a balm against the foulness of the terrible facts, and Baxter leavens the outrage with clips from the classic 1983 film Local Hero, which was shot nearby and tells a similar story of locals resisting corporate takeover. But unlike in that movie, there’s nothing charming or funny in any of this, and there is no happy ending. It’s impossible to look at Trump here and not imagine that what he has done to Aberdeenshire and the Forbeses is precisely what he will do to America should he win the White House.

we’ve been trumped, too
The you in that You’ve Been Trumped refers to the people of Aberdeenshire. The you in Baxter’s new followup documentary You’ve Been Trumped, Too is us, Americans. Baxter revisits Aberdeenshire and the Forbeses and their neighbors in 2016 to see how their battle with Trump has progressed in the intervening five years. It’s all been negative: the Forbeses still don’t have a regular water supply, and Molly, now 92 years old, relies on bottled water and water she hauls in buckets from a stream; she looks much frailer today, and it’s easy to believe that massive stress has contributed a lot more to that than normal aging has. None of Trump’s bombastic promises about the great things Golf Links was going to do for the local economy have transpired: he promised 6,000 jobs, but fewer than 100 have been created.

Of course, Baxter’s return comes amidst Trump’s run for the US presidency (“I hope it doesn’t happen for America’s sake,” Molly says worriedly, “and for the world”), and his intended audience here is Americans, who need to know with what arrogance and disdain Trump wields the power his money affords him. You don’t need to have seen You’ve Been Trumped to jump right into this film: Baxter recaps the essentials of the sordid tale of Golf Links, and then he hops over to the US to talk to people on the street in Washington DC to enlighten them about Trump’s appalling business practices. He goes to Flint, Michigan, to compare the water crisis there to the mini water crisis in Aberdeenshire. He brings Michael Forbes and his wife, Sheila, to Cincinnati for the Republic convention in July where Trump was officially nominated for president, where the Forbeses share with Americans their firsthand experience of how badly Trump treats “little people.” Baxter also finds, unsurprisingly, an American analog for Molly Forbes, an elderly woman in Atlantic City who fought a similar battle with Trump and his boardwalk casino resort.

If Donald Trump weren’t running for president of the United States, and have a good possibility of actually winning, Baxter’s story and the abuse that the Forbeses and their neighbors have faced would be, sadly, yet another tale of profit over people and corporations and governments colluding for their own benefits. But with Trump so close to becoming the most powerful person on the planet, Baxter’s films are absolutely horrifying. In Trumped, Too, he makes a pointed comparison between the likes of Molly, who was a Land Girl during WWII and worked as a dairy farmer while all the men were off fighting, and the Trumps. Molly talks about how she ensured the animals she worked with were happy and well cared for, that they gave better milk when they were. And Donald Trump Jr. talks about how to make elephants in Africa pull their weight economically, and he hunts endangered animals for fun. These are diametrically opposite approaches to life: Are people and animals and landscapes commodities for rich bastards to exploit, or things with their own intrinsic value? Do we want a man who believes the former to have even more power to implement such a philosophy?

Every American should see this film before Election Day, but most especially all the “little people” who think Trump is on their side. He isn’t, and he will chew them up and spit them out just as he has tried to do with the Forbeses. And not everyone will have the tenacity of the Forbeses to fight back.