President Trump opened a new golf course bearing his name in Scotland on Tuesday, capping a five-day foreign trip designed around promoting his family’s luxury properties and playing golf, and agreeing on a major trade deal framework with the EU.
“Let’s go. 1-2-3,” Mr. Trump said before he cut the red ribbon.
Mr. Trump and his sons, Eric and Donald Jr., were also set to play the first-ever round at the new Trump course in the village of Balmedie, on the northern coast of Scotland.
“This has been an unbelievable development,” the president said before the ceremonial opening. He thanked his son Eric for his work on the project, saying it was “truly a labor of love for him.”
The overseas jaunt enabled Mr. Trump escape Washington’s sweaty summer humidity and the still-raging scandal over the case of Jeffrey Epstein.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images 
It was mostly built around golf – and walking the new course before it officially begins offering rounds to the public on Aug. 13, adding to a lengthy list of ways the president has used the White House to promote his brand.
Billing itself the “Greatest 36 Holes in Golf,” the Trump International Golf Links, Scotland, was designed by Eric Trump. The course is hosting a PGA Seniors Championship event later this week, after Mr. Trump leaves. Signs promoting the event had already been erected all over the course before he arrived on Tuesday and, on the highway leading in, temporary metal signs guided drivers onto the correct road.
Golfers hitting the course at dawn as part of that event had to put their clubs through metal detectors erected as part of the security sweeps ahead of his arrival. Several dozen people, some dressed for golf, including wearing cleats, had filled the sand trap near the tee box to watch the ribbon-cutting ceremony shortly before it was scheduled to start. Another group of people was watching from the other side in tall grass growing on sand dunes flanking the first hole.
Also from Scotland’s north is the president’s late mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, who was born on the Isle of Lewis, immigrated to New York and died in 2000 at age 88.
“My mother loved Scotland,” Mr. Trump said during a meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday at another one of his golf courses, Turnberry, on Scotland’s southern coast. “It’s different when your mother was born here.”
Mr. Trump used his trip to meet with Starmer and reach a trade framework for tariffs between the U.S. and the European Union’s 27 member countries – though scores of key details remain to be hammered out. But the trip has featured a lot of golf, and having the president visit is sure to raise the new course’s profile.
Mr. Trump’s assets are in a trust, and his sons are running the family business while he’s in the White House. Any business generated at the course will ultimately enrich the president when he leaves office though.
A press release says the new course features the world’s largest natural bunker, dunes and greens overlooking the sea, with a “focus on environmental sensitivity.”
Visible from various parts of the new course were towering windmills lining the coast – some with blades that showed visible dots of rust. They are part of a nearby windfarm that Mr. Trump sued to block construction of in 2013.
He lost that case and was eventually ordered to pay legal costs for bringing it – and the issue still enrages him. During the meeting with Starmer, Mr. Trump called windmills “ugly monsters” and suggested they were part of “the most expensive form of energy.”
“I restricted windmills in the United States because they also kill all your birds,” the president said. “If you shoot a bald eagle in the United States, they put you in jail for five years. And windmills knock out hundreds of them. They don’t do anything. Explain that.”
Starmer said in the U.K, “we believe in a mix” of energy, including oil and gas and renewables.
The new golf course is the third owned by the Trump Organization in Scotland. Mr. Trump bought Turnberry in 2014 and owns another course near Aberdeen that opened in 2012.
Mr. Trump golfed at Turnberry on Saturday as protesters took to the streets, and on Sunday. He invited Starmer, who famously doesn’t golf, aboard Air Force One so the prime minister could get a private tour of his Aberdeen properties before Tuesday’s ceremonial opening.
“Even if you play badly, it’s still good,” Mr. Trump said of golfing on his course over the weekend. “If you had a bad day on the golf course, it’s OK. It’s better than other days.”
Mr. Trump also found time to to praise Turnberry’s renovated ballroom, which he said he’d paid lavishly to upgrade – even suggesting that he might install one like it at the White House.
“I could take this one, drop it right down there,” Mr. Trump joked. “And it would be beautiful.”
