Old Man Goes To Scotland, Yells At Wind, Maybe Cheats At Golf
Perhaps sort of makes an EU trade deal, but not an actually good one?
With the stench of a potential pardon for his pimp pal Ghislaine Maxwell stinking up the states, the president has decamped for a four-day trip to Scotland, the country where his mother was born. As a convicted felon is he even allowed in? Guess so! And he got a hearty Scottish welcome: crowds of protesters everywhere he went, holding cheeky signs, pictures of Jeffrey Epstein, and blowing their bagpipes at him.
Unsure what “HOPE YER NEXT JOBBY IS A HEDGEHOG” means exactly, but it doesn’t sound pleasant.
They used to like him somewhat over there! He was named a business ambassador, and was given an honorary degree. Trump’s mother Mary Anne MacLeod was an immigrant from Scotland, English was her second language, and Scots Gaelic was her first. (“Carson a dh'fheumas mi aon a bhrùthadh airson Beurla?” means “Why do I have to press one for English?”) Weird how Trump and all his kids except Tiffany are anchor babies, by his own definition. The resemblance between Trump and his late mother is uncanny.
But the felon hotelier’s relationship with Scotland soon soured.
Before Trump’s first term he battled with Aberdeenshire locals, after he tore up local dunes, blocked the locals’ views with his hotel, and then fought offshore wind turbines that were being built within view of his golf course, like the asshole hypocrite he is.
In 2015 then-First Minister Nicola Sturgeon withdrew his membership from the GlobalScot business network after he said racist shit and publicly thirsted for a Muslim immigration ban, and he was also stripped of an honorary degree from the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen.
And Trump sued the government over the wind turbines and lost, bigly, and was forced to pay legal costs. Always one to carry a grudge, he’s been obsessively furious and bitter at wind power ever since, ranting that it causes cancer and makes whales go crazy.
Now Trump owns two, going on three, golf courses in Scotland, and his entitled bawbag behavior, along with championing Brexit, Russia, and denying climate change and gestures all around has endeared him to no one. A recent poll found 71 percent of people in Scotland have an unfavorable opinion of him.
And grampy Trump is still yelling at the wind!
“The wind, the wind, it sounds so wonderful,” he moaned last year, sounding like some kind of AI translation. “The wind, the wind, the wind is, the wind is bullshit, I’ll tell you.” That lying-ass wind!
And now Trump is back to Scotland. Mostly to play golf on the taxpayers’ dime, to yell about the wind some more, and to meet with European and UK leaders on the side. Saturday he golfed, and Sunday golfed again, this time with his ugliest son, Junior, and dumbest son, Eric, in pants that looked two sizes too small. He met with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the side after his match, because priorities. And was bleated at by bagpipes some more! William Wallace says heeeeeyy.
And oh, did he cheat at golf again? Watch the caddy’s hand while he drops a ball for daddy! Maybe Trump’s taking a two-stroke sand-trap penalty?
On Sunday he was back to the subject of the wind, which he hates even more than low-flow toilets or Rosie O’Donnell, going on a loony pivot in front of a baffled Ursula von der Leyen that wind is “killing us.” It was a rant observers called “total mental collapse.”
“They’re killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains ― and I’m not talking about airplanes. I’m talking about beautiful plains, beautiful areas in the United States, and you look up and you see windmills all over the place. It’s a horrible thing. It’s the most expensive form of energy. It’s no good. They’re made in China, almost all of them.”
And he ranted wind turbines “rust and rot in eight years” and then can’t be “buried” because they will harm the soil, and “the whole thing is a con job. It’s very expensive. And in all fairness, Germany tried it and wind doesn’t work.”
That’s just, like, his aesthetic opinion, man, and the wind is not broken. As HuffPost points out,
Germany gets more than a quarter of its energy from wind, turbines last about 30 years (not eight), according to the U.S Department of Energy, it’s not the most expensive form of energy, and they’re not “almost all” made in China.
But he did make a trade deal with the EU, maybe, two weeks after his self-proclaimed 90 deals in 90 days passed. Only 80-something more deals to go!
Or Trump said he made a deal. The guy has an epic history of claiming to have made a deal, great deal, biggest deal ever, only to have invented the whole thing in his mind, or have made a deal the fine print reveals to be bullshit, or to back out of whatever deal he claims to have made entirely. See also China, Canada and Mexico, or look at this insane chart.
The art of making a deal with a drunk monkey driving a lawn mower! And the text of this European deal has not yet been released. But, reports the Wall Street Journal:
[T]he preliminary deal on Sunday that puts baseline tariffs at 15% for most European goods. In parallel, the EU said European companies would buy $750 billion of American energy products over three years and invest an additional $600 billion in the U.S.
Aircraft and their components, certain chemicals, semiconductor equipment and some agricultural products looked set to be exempted from the new tariffs. Cars appeared on course to face 15% tariffs, lower than the current level.
So, worse than the 10 percent baseline that most countries get. Way to treat your allies, if they can even be called allies anymore! Still, the stock market surged on this announcement, which will still reduce everybody’s GDP and shit on the global economy, just less than before. The Wall Street Journal calls it the “least bad outcome,” which we guess is the best one can expect, these days.
Playing golf, embarrassing the US on the world stage with nonsensical rants, and getting praise for doing things to (partially) unfuck a mess that he himself made, yep, that’s all on brand for him. America’s power is shorted out and blowin’ in the wind, but at least during his time on the golf course he’s occupied with something besides finding new things to fuck up!
[New Yorker archive link / Times UK / WSJ gift link / HuffPost]
Absolutely cheats at golf.
One of the stupidest parts of this is Trump acting like he gives a rat’s ass about whales.
If there was any money in it he would be blowing them up for sport.