A New Golf Course and Old Grudges Await Trump in Scotland

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Michael Forbes has been at odds with President Trump since the day Mr. 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 Mr. 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,” Mr. Forbes, 73, said this week of his property, which is surrounded by a new golf course that Mr. Trump is expected to dedicate when he visits his two resorts in Scotland this week. “I keep three Highland cows behind the house,” Mr. 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 Mr. 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,” Mr. Forbes said, a claim that was thrown in doubt a few minutes later by John Duncan, a nearby contractor who clears ditches for Mr. Trump. “I love the man,” Mr. Duncan said, noting that the president’s resort, Trump International Scotland, employs 35 greenskeepers alone.