Trump lands in Scotland to inaugurate his new golf course and as the Jeffrey Epstein saga follows him from Washington
Trump, 79, has made golf an important part of his life and his business empire – visiting courses more than 60 times in his second term. He is doing so again six months into his second term, with planned visits to both of his Scottish courses.
The president spoke reverentially about his Turnberry course as he left the White House – but still got hit with questions about whether he would pardon Ghislaine Maxwell, who met with top DOJ officials this week amid new scrutiny of the convicted sex offender who died in his jail cell.
And he issued a new iteration of his denial of a sensational report in the Wall Street Journal that he drew a picture of a woman for Epstein as part of a special birthday volume. 'Somebody could have written a letter and used my name,' Trump posited. He said he has the 'power' to pardon Maxwell, who is serving jail time after being convicted of assisting Epstein in his sex trafficking network.
Here in Scotland, Trump is set to inaugurate a new course in Aberdeenshire, on a trip where squeezing his hosts to bring the British Open to his Turnberry Course is also on tap.
The new MacLeod course in Menie is named for his late mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, who was born in Scotland and emigrated to the U.S.
Trump is already predicting victory on that front. 'I think they will do that,' he said of bringing the Open to his Turnberry course. 'Turnberry is rated the number one course in the world. I think they'll do that.'
But he pushed back when asked if he was going to convince anyone of his stance on the trip. 'No, it's not about that,' Trump said.
'It's the best resort in the world, I think, Turnberry, and it's one of the greatest courses in the world.'
A potential championship isn't the only dealmaking on the horizon. Trump and British PM Keir Starmer, who inked a trade deal at the G7 in Canada shortly before Starmer dropped it on camera, still must negotiate substantial details.
That puts prices for cars, auto parts, chicken, beef, and digital clicks in play, after a U.S.-UK trade deal in May set only broad parameters but left many details to be worked out.
Trump set off confusion before he even left the White House when he told reporters that 'We're meeting with the prime minister tonight' and that 'We're going to be talking about the trade deal that we made and maybe even improve it.'
There was no expectation that Trump would even see Starmer until later in his visit.
Trump has been flouting his ability to bring other nations to heel by publicly releasing trade letters announcing what tariffs they will face. The White House said the number had reached 25 before he left Washington.
Trump blasted out yet another threat Friday when he said there was a 'fifty-fifty' chance of a deal with the European Union, while saying the powerful trade block must 'buy down' the threatened 30 percent tariff.
But the lure of his upcoming State Visit and meeting with King Charles is preventing Trump from playing full hardball, one insider tells the Daily Mail.
Trump's language as he left town was very much in keeping with that stance.
Trump called it 'more fine-tuning.'
'And also we do a little celebrating together, because, you know, we got along very well. UK has been trying to make a deal with us for like 12 years, and haven't been able to do it. We got it done.'
He called Starmer a 'good prime minister' and a 'good guy' who was 'doing a very good job.
'So we're going to see. We're going to meet at Turnberry and we're going to meet at Aberdeen. So two beautiful places.' But he said there was 'not a lot' of wiggle room on steel and aluminum tariffs he has imposed using Section 232 authority.
The absence of detailed information on the weekend schedule released by the White House makes clear that there is plenty of golf in Trump's future. He has no public events Saturday or Sunday, when he will be at Turnberry.
His Starmer meeting comes Monday, after which the pair are expected to tour Trump's new course.
Trump is also expected to meeting First Minister John Swinney, who is scoring the face time despite publicly backing Trump's rival Kamala Harris in the election.
Also greeting Trump: protests. During his 2018 visit to Scotland during his first term, Trump was trailed by a Trump baby balloon.
This time, the Stop Trump Coalition is among groups planning to make a public statement, with protests expected at both of Trump's courses.
Trump's former national security advisor John Bolton is among those positing that Trump's trip is more than a weekend getaway.
He noted that Trump hadn't been there in seven years, and said maybe it would 'kick up a little free advertising after he comes and goes.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
19 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Trump's Golden Dome to undergo crucial test
A major defense contractor has announced plans to conduct space-based tests on President Donald Trump 's Golden Dome within the next three years. Lockheed Martin, one of the Pentagon 's prime military contractors responsible for the F-35 fighter jet and Black Hawk helicopters, will demonstrate a space-based interceptor missile by 2028, the company has announced. Lockheed is now quickly creating command and control (C2) capabilities to aid in Trump's Golden Dome initiative, the company announced this week. 'Golden Dome for America is a challenge unlike anything attempted at this scale or on this timeline, and we're moving fast to bring together connected C2 capabilities that work now,' Thad Beckert, Golden Dome C2 director at Lockheed Martin, said in a press release. The Golden Dome is projected to cost around $175 billion in total and take three years to be ready, Trump has said, though analysts expect the project to cost more and take longer. Whichever Pentagon contractor can successfully prove a reliable ability to shoot down incoming advanced missiles first could win billions in funding, meaning the race to shoot down missiles in space is on. Congress has already approved $24.4 billion worth of Golden Dome funding in Trump's recently passed domestic policy agenda dubbed the 'One Big, Beautiful Bill.' An estimate from the Arms Control Center shows that the total funding for the project could reach up to $500 billion. The Congressional Budget Office also estimates that the project could cost up to $540 billion over the next two decades. 'We have missile warning and tracking satellites made by Lockheed Martin in orbit today that provide timely detection and warning of missile threats,' said Amanda Pound, mission strategy and advanced capabilities director at Lockheed Martin Space, told Fox News Digital this week. 'We are committed to making space-based interceptors for missile defense a reality, leveraging our decades of experience, investments, and industry partnerships, to be ready for on orbit testing in 2028.' Trump first announced the Golden Dome initiative in May, expressing his desire to create a system similar to Israel's Iron Dome, which has proved vital in its war with Hamas. 'This is very important for the success and even survival of our country. It's a pretty evil world out there,' he said. 'Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they're launched from space. And we will have the best system ever built.' Trump declared that the establishment of the Golden Dome would provide 'close to 100 percent protection' of the U.S. and is 'very important for the success and even survival of our country.' The missile defense system, along with others, has been praised for shooting down ballistic missiles launched at the country from Iran and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon. The U.S. Golden Dome project will feature a vast array of sensors, satellites, land and space-based weapons that all work together to identify and neutralize targets. 'This rapid C2 prototyping effort is one among many within Lockheed Martin demonstrating how we can support the US Government as a Golden Dome for America mission partner,' said Daniel Nimblett, Vice President of Layered Homeland Defense at Lockheed Martin. He said the project aims to deliver 'real-time situational awareness' and 'informed decision-making to defend the nation.' Lockheed demonstrated its ability to intercept hypersonic medium-range missiles in March after testing its Aegis Combat System aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer. Previously, a similar effort was launched in 1983 under President Ronald Reagan called the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was later dubbed 'Star Wars.' That ambitious plan sought to similarly install space-based defense systems. However, it was eventually scrubbed due to inadequate technology and ballooning costs.
Economist
21 minutes ago
- Economist
The long-term effects of hunger in Gaza
FOR two weeks, the world has claimed it is working to end the widespread hunger in Gaza. The UN is pleading with Israel to allow more lorries of aid into the territory. Arab and Western states are airdropping food. On August 5th Donald Trump said America would take a larger role in distributing aid, though he was vague about the details. 'I know Israel is going to help us with that in terms of distribution, and also money,' he said. Yet on the ground, Gazans say little has changed. There is not enough food entering Gaza, nor is there law and order to allow its distribution. Airdrops are hard to reach. Convoys are looted soon after they cross the border. Finding food often requires making a risky trip to an aid centre, where hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in recent months, or paying exorbitant sums on the black market. This is a calamity in its own right, one that will have long-term consequences for many Gazans, particularly children. But it is also a glimpse of Gaza's future. Even after the war ends, it will remain at the mercy of others for years to come. Wedged between Israel and Egypt, the tiny territory was never self-sufficient. Its neighbours imposed an embargo after Hamas, a militant group, took power in 2007. The economy withered. Half of the workforce in the strip was unemployed and more than 60% of the population relied on some form of foreign aid to survive. The UN doled out cash assistance, ran a network of clinics that offered 3.5m consultations a year and operated schools that educated some 300,000 children. Still, Gaza could meet at least some basic needs by itself. Two-fifths of its territory was farmland that supplied enough dairy, poultry, eggs and fruits and vegetables to meet most local demand. Small factories produced everything from packaged food to furniture. The Hamas-run government was inept, but it provided law and order. After nearly two years of war, almost none of that remains. The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) says that Gaza's 2m people need 62,000 tonnes of food a month. That is a bare-bones calculation: it would provide enough staple foods but no meat, fruits and vegetables or other perishables. By its own tally, Israel has allowed far less in. It imposed a total siege on the territory from March 2nd until May 19th, with no food permitted to enter. Then Israel allowed the UN to resume limited aid deliveries to northern Gaza. It also helped establish the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a shadowy outfit that distributes food at four points in southern and central Gaza. In more than two months of operation, it has handed out less than 0.7 meals per Gazan per day—and that assumes each box of aid, stocked with a hotch-potch of dried and canned goods, really provides as many meals as the GHF claims it does. All told, Israel permitted 98,674 tonnes of food aid to cross the border in the five months through July, an average of 19,734 tonnes a month—just 32% of what the WFP says is necessary. Although the volume of aid has increased in recent days, it is still insufficient. 'We're trying to get 80 to 100 trucks in, every single day,' says Valerie Guarnieri of the WFP. 'It's not a high bar, but a realistic bar of what we can achieve.' On August 4th, though, Israel allowed only 41 of the agency's lorries to enter a staging area on the Gaza border, and it let drivers collect just 29 of them. Getting into Gaza is only the first challenge. Distribution is a nightmare. Since May 19th the UN has collected 2,604 lorryloads of aid from Gaza's borders. Just 300 reached their intended destination. The rest were intercepted en route, either by desperate civilians or by armed men. Aid workers are nonchalant about civilians raiding aid lorries, which they euphemistically call 'self-distribution': they reckon the food still reaches people who need it. 'There's a real crescendo of desperation,' says Ms Guarnieri. 'People have no confidence food is going to come the next day.' But the roaring black market suggests that much of it is stolen. Gaza's chamber of commerce publishes a regular survey of food prices (see chart). A 25kg sack of flour, which cost 35 shekels ($10) before the war, went for 625 shekels on August 5th. A kilo of tomatoes fetched 100 shekels, 50 times its pre-war value. Such prices are far beyond the reach of most Gazans. Those with a bit of money often haggle for tiny quantities: a shopper might bring home a single potato for his family, for example. Israel's ostensible goal in throttling the supply of aid was to prevent Hamas from pilfering any of it. Earlier this month the group released a propaganda video of Evyatar David, an Israeli hostage still held in Gaza. He was emaciated, and spent much of the video recounting how little he had to eat: a few lentils or beans one day, nothing the next. At one point a militant handed Mr David a can of beans from behind the camera. Many viewers noted that the captor's hand looked rather chubby. As much of Gaza starves, Hamas, it seems, is still managing to feed its fighters. The consequences of Israel's policy instead fall hardest on children—sometimes even before birth. 'One in three pregnancies are now high-risk. One in five babies that we've seen are born premature or underweight,' says Leila Baker of the UN's family-planning agency. Compare that with before the war, when 8% of Gazan babies were born underweight (at less than 2.5kg). There were 222 stillbirths between January and June, a ten-fold increase from levels seen before the war. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN-backed outfit that tracks hunger, said last month that 20,000 children were hospitalised for acute malnutrition between April and mid-July. Even before they reach that point, their immune systems crumble. Moderately malnourished children catch infections far more easily than well-fed ones, and become more seriously ill when they do, rapidly losing body weight. The body takes a 'big hit' when food intake falls to just 70-80% of normal, says Marko Kerac, a paediatrician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who has treated children in famine-stricken places. Most children in Gaza are eating a lot less than that. In July the World Health Organisation reported an outbreak of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease that may have links to hunger. Gaza's health ministry says cases are multiplying, including among children. Give us our daily bread Nor is calorie intake the only concern. Although flour and salt in Gaza are fortified with some vitamins and minerals, such as iodine, they are consumed in limited amounts—especially now, since many bakeries have been closed for months, owing to a lack of flour and fuel. In February, during the ceasefire, Israel allowed 15,000 tonnes of fruits and vegetables and 11,000 tonnes of meat and fish into Gaza. Since March it has allowed just 136 tonnes of meat. All of this means there is widespread deficiency of essential nutrients that help children's brains develop. Every child in Gaza, in other words, will remain at lifelong risk of poor health because of today's malnutrition. There is consistent evidence for this from studies of populations that have lived through famine: during the second world war, the 1960s famine in China and, more recently, places like Ethiopia. Children who have suffered acute malnourishment have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and other chronic diseases as adults. They are also at risk of worse cognitive development. A flood of aid cannot undo the damage, but it can prevent it from getting worse. It will have to be sustained. The devastation wrought by Israel's war has left Gazans with no alternative but to rely on aid. In February the UN estimated that the war had caused $30bn in physical damage and $19bn in economic disruption, including lost labour, forgone income and increased costs. Reconstruction would require $53bn. At this point, that is little more than a guess. The real cost is impossible to calculate. But it will be enormous. The first task will be simply clearing the rubble. A UN assessment in April, based on satellite imagery, estimated that there were 53m tonnes of rubble strewn across Gaza—30 times as much debris as was removed from Manhattan after the September 11th attacks. Clearing it could be the work of decades. The seven-week war between Israel and Hamas in 2014, the longest and deadliest before the current one, produced 2.5m tonnes of debris. It took two years to remove. Rebuilding a productive economy will be no less difficult. Take agriculture. The UN's agriculture agency says that 80% of Gaza's farmland and 84% of its greenhouses have been damaged in the war. Livestock have been all but wiped out. A satellite assessment last summer found that 68% of Gaza's roads had been damaged (that figure is no doubt higher today). The two main north-south roads—one along the coast, the other farther inland—are both impassable in places. Even if farmers can start planting crops for small harvests after the war, it will be hard to bring their produce to market. The picture is equally bleak in other sectors: schools, hospitals and factories have all been largely reduced to rubble. The Geneva Conventions are clear that civilians have the right to flee a war zone. Exercising that right in Gaza is fraught: Palestinians have a well-grounded fear that Israel will never allow them to return. Powerful members of Binyamin Netanyahu's government do not hide their desire to ethnically cleanse the territory and rebuild the Jewish settlements dismantled in 2005. Still, the dire conditions have led some people to think the unthinkable: a survey conducted in May by a leading Palestinian pollster found that 43% of Gazans are willing to emigrate at the end of the war. Mr Netanyahu may not follow through on his talk of reoccupying Gaza, which he hinted at in media leaks earlier this month. His far-right allies may not fulfil their dream of rebuilding the Jewish settlements dismantled in 2005. In a sense, though, the ideologues in his cabinet have already achieved their goal. Israel's conduct of the war has left Gazans with a grim choice: leave the territory, or remain in a place rendered all but uninhabitable. ■
The Guardian
21 minutes ago
- The Guardian
John Hipkin obituary
My father, John Hipkin, who has died aged 90, was a teacher, councillor and former mayor of Cambridge. He brought intelligence, compassion and moral clarity to his four decades serving in local government, first as a Labour county councillor for Romsey ward in 1977; later, as a founding member of the SDP, he became a Lib Dem city councillor for Castle ward in 1992. He then served as an independent until his retirement from local politics in 2021. He was chair of the planning committee for a period and was mayor in 2005-06. Choosing 'peace' as the focus of his year, he was touched to be invited to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan to mark the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings of those cities. John was also a co-founder of the Western Buddhist Order in 1967, and a founder, in 1960, and director for the Advisory Centre for Education, a service that gives advice to parents, carers, governors, local authorities and others on education law. He also did research at King's College Cambridge for the Public Schools Commission (1965-68), looking at the possibilities of integrating public schools into the maintained system of education. Born in Derby, John experienced adversity in his early life. His mother, Bunty (Elsie) Holloway, was forced to place John into the care of Dr Barnardo's when he was five; his two younger siblings, Anthony and Naomi, were adopted separately. His father, Jack Hipkin, a mounted police officer, was married, and during the second world war the relationship ended. After being placed with foster carers, education offered John a way forward. He passed the 11-plus, attended two grammar schools, first in Diss, Norfolk, and then in Surbiton, near Kingston upon Thames. He went to the London School of Economics, graduating with a first-class degree in history and economics. John became an English teacher and was determined to give back to the system that changed the direction of his life. In his first post at Senacre school in Maidstone, Kent, he developed his own English curriculum and wrote and produced a play, The Massacre of Peterloo (1968), which enlisted everyone in a collaborative production, with each student committed to a role. He later became head of English at Meridian school in Royston, Hertfordshire, and retired in 1995. He was reunited with his mother and his sister, who had changed her name from Naomi to Margaret, and his brother, Anthony, who died in 2014. Bunty had three other children, Hugh, David and Pamela. Rediscovering his siblings and their families was a healing experience. He is survived by his second wife, Marie-Louise (nee Holland), whom he married in 2004, and by his children Charlotte, Thomas, Joseph, Daniel and David, from his first marriage, to Bronwyn Dewey, which ended in divorce; me, from his relationship with Sylvie Chastagnol; and Imogen, from his marriage to Marie-Louise.
