You’ve Been Trumped Too
Directed by Anthony Baxter
Certificate PG
Molly Forbes lives in Aberdeenshire. She is in her 90s, and her small crofter’s cottage happens to be in a protected area of outstanding natural beauty.
A few years back, American industrialist Donald Trump decided to plonk a whacking great luxury golf course on her doorstep, and this film reveals how five years since it was finished, cottages around the course are without running water after construction work broke a pipe that fed their taps. It is stated that Trump’s team cut off the water supply by accident, but the viewer cannot help sense an air of vindictiveness.
How hard must it be to re-connect a broken pipe – or are there more sinister forces at work? Molly and her neighbours did not want the course to be built and did not want to lose their homes so Trump could get his way.
The film tells their story, and director Baxter takes Molly’s son Michael and Sheila, another neighbour, over to the US to the Republican convention to speak to Trump supporters and let them know about how he has behaved. Whether a British film-maker telling this story now will have any effect on next week’s voting is a moot point. Their stories deserve to be recorded.
There was a Guardian campaign eight years ago during the first election Obama won urging readers to write to voters in swing States, urging them to vote Democrat. It was criticised as being peevishly arrogant, as if the British intelligentsia should mind their own business. But the simple fact is elections everywhere matter to all, not just the US one, though as a major power its result can have a greater effect.
It matters for a variety of reasons: because we are allowed to hold political views about what happens domestically in other countries, as surely we want what we perceive as the best for fellow humans, no matter what man-made border lies between us.
It matters because human rights and the wish for a better world is universal. By using the story of Trump’s neighbours in Scotland, Baxter has cleverly illustrated the wider issue about how utterly surreal it is that this cartoon baddie has managed to hijack the Republicans. What a horribly unpleasant character he is, and how misguided his supporters appear.
It should also lead to self-analysis by the left too, as they need to work out why this has happened and what can be done to stop it occurring again. You sense that for the likes of Molly and Michael, when they walk along their beach all they leave is footprints. For Trump, it’s a ghastly, destructive luxury resort. I know whose values I admire, and hope the majority of those who will be voting next week feel the same.
