Donald Trump documentary exposes billionaire's shocking treatment of Scottish family
It has been five years since Anthony Baxter's first documentary on the subject and the Forbes family, including 92-year-old Mollie, are still without running water since Trump flew into Aberdeenshire and started building golf courses
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92-year-old Mollie Forbes is not impressed by the Republican businessman running for US president.
When she learns, in the new documentary You’ve Been Trumped Too, that she reminds Donald Trump of his mother, she guffaws in her chair.
"He mustn’t have treated her very well then," she replies.
It has been five years since Trump first flew into Aberdeenshire on his helicopter, bulldozing sand dunes, cutting off the Forbes’ water supply, insulting them publicly and filing motions to force people out of their homes.
"I think she’d be very proud of what I’ve done in Scotland," Trump says, thinking of his mother who was born in the Hebridean islands.
Anthony Baxter’s follow-up to his 2011 documentary, You’ve Been Trumped, focusing on the rise of Trump’s golf courses in Scotland and the corresponding degradation of Aberdeenshire's people and habitat, spares no punches.
In 2016, we watch the elderly woman demonstrate how she washes herself over the kitchen sink. She said she relies on her son, Michael - the man Trump said lived in a “pig sty” - and relatives to bring her water.
The new documentary is bigger - Trump is running for president, and we see the theatrical backdrops of his rallies and the glitz of the convention juxtaposed with the quiet beauty of Aberdeenshire and his half-empty golf resort.
Is it better? In some ways. We get another look at the optimism, dignity and no-nonsense natures of the Forbes family, a family that Trump tried so hard to bring down.
Michael Forbes, pushed by Trump’s insults, gets his rusty tractor working again and his proud mother takes a picture. He even goes to the Republican National Convention in Ohio, talking to supporters of Trump - but he is always respectful of their views and wishes one “the best of luck with him”.
The narrative of the film, set to eerie music, interweaves between the elderly Forbes in her purple cardigan, gathering water from the local stream in Balmedie, five years after Trump’s workers cut off her water supply, and the multi-billionaire himself, flying around in his helicopter on his race to the White House.
While Donald Trump’s sons are trophy hunting leopards and elephants, Ms Forbes is brushing horses’ tails as a land army girl in Scotland during the Second World War.
While Trump holds a rally in front of a battle ship in Virginia, boasting about how much he loves the second amendment and the military, Forbes is standing by her local WW2 memorial, which claimed her late husband’s brother.
Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of the film is that Trump agrees to speak to Baxter, even after the first documentary came out, because it was "picked up by the BBC" and changed his view of the documentary maker. It is mostly the set-up to the interview, rather than the interview itself, which Baxter chooses to show. Trump fiddles with his cuff links, checks he has the best clip-on microphone and asks which camera is the main one focusing on him.
It isn’t just the Forbes family who are suffering a lack of drinking water, and the problems facing Trump in Aberdeenshire could echo much larger-scale issues he might face as president.
In Flint, Michigan, only 20 miles from one of the first major rallies on the Trump campaign, around 100,000 people are living with lead-contaminated drinking water.
Trump said he should not comment on the matter, and leave it to governor Rick Snyder who had a "difficult job". Snyder has been widely criticised for telling residents the water was safe to drink when it was not.
Baxter also documents the struggle he had to film the story. That includes being thrown in jail by Scottish police after asking residents questions about their building problems following the Trump project.
Michael Forbes finally takes the matter into his own hands, and digs up the water pipe leading to his house which the Trump team promised was in good shape. It was backlogged with stones and had holes in it, allowing sludge from the road to contaminate the water supply.
Now he and his mother have running water. But the Scottish government has neither ruled out further expansion of the Trump golf course nor forced eviction of local residents.
As the world waits for the presidential election on 8 November, the small community in Aberdeenshire is also waiting.
It might be on a much smaller scale, but the residents of Balmedie can arguably claim to know the damaging effects of Trump and his policies first hand.
You've Been Trumped Too, by Montrose Pictures, premieres on Friday 28 October
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