According to local officials who attended the early meetings, he spoke of the Menie dunes as “raw land,” as if the ancient, shifting ridge line were simply a stubborn blueprint awaiting his approval.¹ In the renderings he unfurled, the dunes flattened into tidy geometry. Homes disappeared. Foot-paths dissolved. The wild coastline rearranged itself to accommodate his signature.
Some villagers welcomed him; others felt history stirring beneath their ribs. The dunes—one of the last major mobile systems in Europe—weren’t just scenic. They were alive. But in Trump’s team memos, they were “terrain.”²
Then came the phrase that changed everything: compulsory purchase. Eminent domain. And with it, the feeling that something old and dangerous had been stirred. A fisherman stood up in a town hall and shouted, “We’ve seen this before. We called it the Clearances.”³ The room fell into a hush edged with fury.
Even Trump’s project director, Neil Hobday, began to recoil. The pressure. The expectation that hold-outs could be forced out. The casual talk about “removing obstacles.” Years later, when reporters asked him why he quit, he answered plainly:
“It became unreasonable for a foreign developer to force out families who’d lived there for generations.”
Hobday walked. Bulldozers rolled in anyway. By 2020, according to Scotland’s own environmental agency, the dunes had deteriorated so badly under the resort’s footprint that they no longer met criteria for protection.⁴ Trump called it progress. Forbes called it destruction.
For a while, the wind carried the story away—until the pattern resurfaced across the sea.
Doughmore Beach in western Ireland smells different: sea-weed, peat smoke, and the mineral tang of the Atlantic. When Trump bought the Doonbeg resort in 2014, some locals welcomed him. A few pubs even hung up photos of his helicopter overhead. For families who’d watched jobs disappear for decades, investment meant hope.
But storms kept eating at the coast, and Trump’s company proposed a two-mile seawall of boulders and concrete to stop the Atlantic from reclaiming the fairways. Planning documents filed with Irish authorities—reviewed by journalists at the time—acknowledged rising seas and increased storm intensity as a threat.⁵ Publicly, Trump dismissed climate change as “nonsense.”
The contradiction unsettled the village.
Fisherman Liam O’Brien pointed at the dunes. “These fed us,” he said. “Cockles. Clams. You kill the dunes, you kill the beach.”
A teacher at a planning hearing warned: “A wall is final. The coast isn’t. It moves. You cannot hold it still without breaking it.”
Ireland’s national appeals board rejected the wall in 2020, citing environmental harm.⁶ The village celebrated so loudly that, according to locals, you could hear the cheering down the coast. But the resort returned with smaller, “soft-engineering” proposals. The pressure continued—gentler, but constant.
Like in Menie, Trump’s instinct wasn’t to live with the land. It was to fix it into a shape that suited him.