Donald Trump: the insiders' verdict

Graeme Smith, who runs a PR and media business in Aberdeen, was for 30 years The Herald’s man in the north-east and, as such, was able to meet, and speak to, Trump on several occasions. "He's a masterful PR," he says. "I remember the first time he came to Aberdeen, in about 2006: he flew in in his big black [Boeing] with ‘Trump’ emblazoned on the side. Even the journalists at that point were asking for his autograph. I think somebody from the local paper gave him a gift of golf balls.

"The media met him at the airport initially. We'd heard all these stories about how he wouldn’t shake your hand in case he gets germs, but he breezed straight up to myself and some other journalists, who were in the front row of the waiting press corps, and he shook our hands and charmed us all.

“Being a cynical and long-serving journalist, there are few people that I have been a little bit excited to meet, and Donald Trump was one of them. The difficulty is shutting him up. I think it was on that same visit when he had a press conference on the Menie estate. He told everyone how it would be the greatest golf course in the world. We all had enough for our stories but then, right at the end, he launched a scathing attack on his neighbour [Michael Forbes] and the terrible state of his farm. This was all on film and it made [Forbes] impossible to ignore: the story became the farmer, who then went on to become the local hero up here.”

Trump was always available if he thought there was a positive spin to put on a story. "I used to phone him regularly at Trump Tower [in New York]. He said to me on more than one occasion, 'Your paper has been very helpful, Graeme, and when the course is opened you'll be on the first tee with me to launch it.'" Smith laughs. "I used to say to people, I'm not sure how I'm going to get on there, given that he's told at least 700 other people exactly the same thing.

"That's the kind of guy he is. He's very impulsive. Once when he came over here his sister [Maryanne Trump Barry], who's a [US circuit court] judge, came with him and I believe that was because she was the only one who could rein him in to any degree at all. Because he has this huge ego, and he just says what he thinks.”

Smith, in common with some others, remembers Trump as being "quite an endearing guy initially" when he met him. Those staff members whom Smith met "genuinely liked" the tycoon. "He's got a sense of humour, and people do like him. He's a workaholic, too. He keeps a fine watch on the detail of his business. I was in seeing Sarah Malone [now executive vice president of Trump International Golf Links, Scotland] and Trump phoned. He knew minute details about spending on the Menie estate – details you would never have expected a man with his assets and interests to know. It was something to do with an item the greenkeeper had bought. Trump queried why it was necessary when they had one already.”

However, Smith also has an impression of Trump as a man who "would trample over anybody who got in his way, and be venomous". And the prospect of Trump succeeding to the Oval Office "absolutely horrifies me. He's a very clever man, but the thought of him and [Vladimir] Putin as two world leaders terrifies me.”

In April 2006, Jack McConnell, the then First Minister, flew to New York in the company of some Scottish Government advisers to meet Trump. The Scottish party's impression of the tycoon reinforced a feeling common to some people who have met him: that in spite of his bluster and displays of egotism, Trump might be insecure. One adviser said: “Trump knows how to do the right thing publicly when he needs to. We met in the concourse of Trump Tower to talk about his plans to invest in Scotland. There was an impromptu press conference on the concourse and Stephen Jardine from STV asked him, if this was an episode of The Apprentice, what advice would he give the First Minister? Trump said, ‘I only have one thing to say – I think he’s a great guy, and he’s hired.’

“Now, Trump had never met McConnell, and knew nothing about him, but he knew how to deal with the situation. People think Trump’s an idiot, but he’s certainly not.”

In a lift afterwards, Trump seemed to be obsessed with Alan Sugar, his counterpart on the UK incarnation of his TV show. He asked McConnell: “So do you think I’m better than him on The Apprentice?” McConnell’s advisers thought this a peculiar question to ask the First Minister on what, after all, was their very first meeting, and given that they had flown to New York to discuss business investment. The tycoon immediately answered his own question: “Well, of course I am. Yes I am – but the people in Britain realise that.”

“It was just through-the-roof ego stuff, hugely competitive,” the adviser added. “The idea that Trump would now stand down and let Hillary [Clinton] become president is pure fiction.”

The lunch was to be about Trump asking if Scotland was a good place to do business; the Scots' reply was, broadly, yes, but there were planning regulations in place, and he would need to make proper applications. There could be no promises, but his business investment would be welcome if it was the right one.

“Trump never asked for anything untoward during the lunch or proposed any bending of rules,” the adviser recalled. “But the main reason the conversation was so straightforward was that, about five minutes into it, McConnell discovered that Trump was wearing a mini-microphone in the knot of his tie.

“So McConnell took his tie off and made Trump take off his. I can't remember the exact words but McConnell said something like, ‘This lunch is over until the ties are off.' He didn’t want to conduct a lunch on that basis.” Trump didn’t seem embarrassed by the request, however. “That was just a weird day,” the adviser adds.

Some people who have dealt with Trump, when asked what sort of president he might make, observe that he would take a lot of advice when in office. Said one: "He appoints very top-level people to work for him, and he delegates to them. He knows he doesn’t know it all. He knows what he’s good at and he employs other people to do other things well for him."

“There’s very little about Donald Trump that doesn’t make my flesh crawl,” says Patrick Harvie MSP, co-convener of the Scottish Green Party. Earlier this year, on the subject of Trump and Prestwick Airport, he described Trump as an “arrogant and racist bully” and a “dangerous extremist”. (First Minister Nicola Sturgeon remarked: “Although I would probably use more diplomatic language, I suspect that my views on Donald Trump are not materially different from Patrick Harvie’s.”)

Harvie saw Trump up close in April 2012 when the tycoon was called as a witness at a meeting of the Scottish Parliament's Energy Committee on green energy targets and spoke about windfarms. “He’s very clearly a bully in the way he has treated his neighbours at the Menie estate, and many other people,” Harvie says now. “He has toxic views on anything from race and immigration to climate denial. I disagreed with the proposal to call him as a witness. It’s not possible to take the views of someone like that seriously when he asserts that climate change is a conspiracy invented by the Chinese Communist Party.

“It was clear that his celebrity status would turn the hearing into a pantomime, which it did.” Trump’s testimony consisted of nothing but "ego and bombast”, he adds. “It would be laughable if he was just a joke character on the celebrity circuit but he is clearly now someone who is genuinely dangerous. I’m not a huge fan of a Hillary Clinton presidency … but in comparison with her, I think many people around the world are genuinely disturbed by the idea that Americans would give that much power to someone so delusional and egotistical, and with such aggressive and prejudiced views.

“He has a long history of racism and has used it to court even more controversy. He’s clearly dangerous and I hope Americans see that, and I think a great many of them will. I hope they will see through him and recognise that the idea of a man who was born into great wealth and is now pretending to be an anti-establishment figure is simply a lie.”

There are those on both sides of the Atlantic who are mystified by how Trump has managed to sustain his assault on the White House when many in his own party are vehemently opposed to him. But a recent BBC online poll of Trump supporters helps explain why he is the GOP's presumptive candidate. Among their reasons: they are angry with politicians; they admire him for "telling it like it is"; they value his business experience; they share his views on Mexicans and Muslims; they want to make America great again.

Trump is also a prolific and highly effective user of social media platforms. As of this week he has sent 32,500 tweets via Twitter, where he has 9.56 million followers. There are regular attacks on "dishonest media" and "Crooked Hillary". As the US magazine Salon noted in February, some social media gurus "are beginning to think that his online campaign presence may be the real reason for his staying power ... every time the public would have dispelled Trump from the race, particularly after his outlandish comments about immigrants, Muslims and well, the general population ... he has inadvertently proven time and time again that the Trump brand is a force to be reckoned with. He has embodied what it means to be a social media savvy politician and cashed into Twitter’s dynamic, real-time messaging tool for his complete and utter enjoyment."

“He’s extremely rude and sometimes that can make other people just stop and let you go on,” observes Harvie. “Sadly, there’s also something general about our culture in that a great many people look at rich, famous individuals as though they have some kind of magic powers or superiority."

Suzanne Kelly, who was born in the United States and has lived in the UK since 1988 and Scotland since 2003, is a contributing reporter to the independent community newspaper Aberdeen Voice. She has spent several years looking into Trump’s activities and the objections of local residents to his Menie golf project. She was pleasantly surprised when her petition to ban Trump from entering the UK, on the grounds of hate speech, attracted no fewer than 586,934 signatures. (It also prompted a debate in the Commons Petition Committee.)

Trump first crossed her radar when she covered the launch in 2011 of Baxter's award-winning documentary, You've Been Trumped. "On that night I met Baxter and met some of the [Menie] residents. The documentary shows you exactly how it is – I know because I've been to the estate and have talked to the residents – and if it's not a warning call to the American voter about what to expect, I don't know what is."

The boxer, Muhammad Ali, died hours before I speak to Kelly. "There's a man who fought against injustice, racism and a very unjust war, and they gave him a prison sentence," she says. "Now we have Donald Trump, and for all his sins we want to give him the presidency."

Asked how she would describe Trump's business conduct in Aberdeenshire, Kelly asserts that it is "ego-driven, narcissistic-led, knee-jerk reactionary kind of thing. If you're his enemy he will try to crush you."

Kelly believes Trump "was able to get a special policing policy for the Menie estate: he was afraid of trespassers and vandals and protesters, and this has led to all sorts of things, like the arrest of Baxter and his colleague Richard Phinney" and what she describes as "the terrible vilification" of farmer Michael Forbes.

"I'm very happy to see Trump is losing ground in the polls to Hillary Clinton" she adds, while recognising that there is a possibility Trump might win in November. "I don't know what the Republican Party is thinking – this is a man who is currently being looked at by New York's attorney-general, who has said of Trump University that it is 'straight-up fraud'.

"Everybody knows there's a certain section of American society that is extremely right-wing and extraordinarily religious, in terms of zealotry and a sort of fascist religion that you kind of see in a stereotypical Muslim Islamist fantasist faction. The Americans are just as bad – bibles and guns, and the conviction that God is on their side. These are the people who are Trump supporters but thankfully it doesn't pertain to everybody around the US. We're not all like that."

Bill McIntosh, leader of South Ayrshire Council, is among the Scots who have met Trump in person. Stressing that he is not referring to any specific meeting, he says in an email: "With Donald Trump, what you see is exactly what you get. While he says what he thinks and polarises opinion wherever he goes, he is one of the most determined and committed businessmen I’ve ever come across and that drive has got him to where he is today.

"While I certainly don’t share his views on everything, I do share his love of South Ayrshire and very much welcome the significant investment his business has brought into our area. More importantly, I welcome the difference it makes to local people, businesses and communities and so, from an economic perspective, his presence in Scotland has delivered positive outcomes."

He adds: "The US presidential race is undoubtedly going to be fascinating to watch and, ultimately, it will be for the American people to decide who they want as president when they go to the polls in November. My job will continue to be to focus on what’s right for South Ayrshire."

A statement on Thursday from Trump International Golf Links, Scotland, read: "Mr Trump is investing hundreds of millions of pounds in the Scottish economy and no-one has invested more in golf in decades. Until now, Turnberry has been unable to attract the huge investment required to secure its future and industry chiefs have applauded Trump International in Aberdeen, which has attracted tens of thousands of much-needed overseas visitors to the region, and has never been more important than now, given the collapse of the oil price. Both properties are critical to the golf, leisure and tourism sector in Scotland. Golfers and guests locally, nationally and internationally love our facilities and services."