PRESIDENT Donald Trump, the son of poor immigrant from Lewis, had never heard of the Highland Clearances before Alex Salmond told him about them in 2011. The astonishing revelation came during the former First Minister’s comedy “roast” of Trump at his latest show on the Edinburgh Fringe yesterday evening, with Alex Salmond calling Trump a “psycho” during an hour of barbed comedy solely targetting the President.
The Clearances incident happened after Trump failed to get compulsory purchase of houses for his Trump International Golf Links on the Menie estate in Aberdeenshire.
The former First Minister explained how Trump turned up for a public local inquiry into the planning application for the Menie golf course.
“He promised millions of dollars investment and thousands of jobs to the public local inquiry,” said Salmond. “All I can say is that he better not try that at a Senate hearing.” Salmond said Trump then sent his son “wee Donald” to tell Aberdeenshire Council that they wanted compulsory purchase of the houses around the course. Salmond explained that Trump Jnr came up against Aberdeenshire councillor Alan Hendry – “Thirty years in the Scots Guards and Grampian police” said Salmond – who told the President’s son that he supported the golf course, but compulsory purchase was going too far.
“He got to his feet, 6ft 2ins and a fine figure of a man,” said Salmond, “who looked at wee Donald and said ‘Listen you horrible little pipsqueak, you are nothing, and I am an elected councillor and if you try and tell me what to do again I will hoist you up that flagpole’.”
In a bid to keep the peace, Salmond then phoned Trump, whose mother Mary Anne was from the Isle of Lewis, to try to explain why compulsory purchase was not popular in parts of Scotland.
“I said ‘Did your mother ever tell you about the Highland Clearances?” said Salmond, “and he said ‘What?’.
“I said that people were compulsory ejected from their land and it made people quite touchy about forcible clearance here. He said ‘Really, I never heard of that’ so I said ‘You’ve heard of it now’.
Salmond revealed that prior to the 2011 Scottish parliamentary election, Trump had then offered to host “the greatest press conference in the history of the world” in the Trump Tower to endorse Salmond as First Minister. This gave me a slight problem,” said Salmond. “I could see electoral doom looming before me, but on the other hand it seemed impolite to reject his overtures.
“So I said to him ‘You know what we Scots are like, being one of us yourself, we’re touchy about folk from outside telling us what to do, so thanks for that great offer but I’ll try and get elected on my own merits’.”
Salmond said the theme of the “Trump roast” show was try to find the joke “that will bring him down before he blows us all up.”
He showed the audience a large picture of himself with Trump at the Dressed to Kilt event in New York in 2006. “At that time he was a registered Democrat, a Clinton donor, and an opponent of the Iraq War. How was I to know he was a psycho?” he said.
Before he was elected President of the US, Donald Trump sent vaguely threatening letters to the then First Minister, Alex Salmond, over the wind turbines that were to be sited off the Trump course at Menie in Aberdeenshire.
Salmond displayed one such Trump letter to the audience: “Change your mind on the wind farm, otherwise you’ll be known for hundreds of years as mad Alex, the man who destroyed Scotland.” Salmond joked: “The Unionist press don’t think I need wind farms to destroy Scotland.” Brilliantly assisted by Des Clarke impersonating the President, the Liverpool comedian John Bishop and Glasgow’s own Janey Godley – she is banned from the US because of her anti-Trump protest at Trump Turnberry golf resort – Salmond and his collaborators regaled the audience with jokes and stories.
Bishop joked that in Liverpool they were all amazed to see Trump arrive in Scotland as “now there was a man in Aberdeen with a sun tan”. Clarke added that Trump’s first wife was “a Czech but the current one is cash”.
The last word went to Salmond in serious mood who predicted that “good people” in America would “get up off their arses and reassert democracy and liberal values”.
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