10-05-2025
Is there any escape from Donald Trump? It's complicated for Scotland
The date is June 2008. The Orange One, tie at full length and combover at full strength, is raising his arm at the gate of his mother's pebbledash house on the Isle of Lewis.
In the background, one of his cousins keeks out the front door. Trump has been inside for a grand total of 97 seconds.
You could be forgiven, these days, for thinking the image was some digital composite. Indeed, morph the hand into a fist, pixelate in some blood, and it's not so far away from Trump's physical reaction to the attempted assassination in July last year.
His iconicity is so overwhelming – from the cheapest shots on social media, to the most momentous shifts in geopolitics and world trade – that I often have to shut him out of my mind, just to recover some sense of agency or citizenship.
Even an old picture of him posing before a humble Scottish home produces, in the present, an authoritarian effect. Is there no fucking escape from this man?
The excellent set of articles in this week's paper provides the answer: no, there isn't much. But if escape is difficult, engagement seems even more complex than that.
The Scottish establishment already has a tawdry, pawky, cheesy relationship with Trump. The 2008 photo occurred during one of the Don's many dealings around his golf courses in Scotland, encouraged by first ministers McConnell and Salmond.
Golf! Other than grouse shooting, is Scotland's territory ever more supine and passive to the executive classes than this?
We not only host Trump Turnberry, but a second golf course at his resort in Aberdeenshire is about to open, titled after his mother's maiden name. The knot of mediocrity and sentimentality is pulled tight.
READ MORE: What I saw when I visited Donald Trump's new Scottish golf course
In these enterprises, Trump has predictably undershot the promises he made on jobs and revenue. But as the Scottish Greens' Patrick Harvie wrote earlier this week, there is deeper due diligence to be conducted.
The New York State Supreme Court has found Donald Trump to be guilty of civil fraud – one of his misdemeanours being 'a false inflation of the value of his assets, including his Scottish golf course', reports Harvie.
Patrick believes this justifies an unexplained wealth order to be raised against Trump by the Scottish Government. This is 'a mechanism that allows investigations into 'politically exposed persons', who are suspected of involvement in serious crime'.
Can you imagine this happening? We've had a week when the UK Government agreed a trade deal (or call it a reasonably light punishment-beating) with the Trump regime. Tributes – a state visit and a dose of Balmorality – have been offered up.
The notion of Scotland holding the US president's feet to the fire of his own criminality, amid all this vassalage… Well, I like it. It accords with the moral character I ascribe to Scottish sovereignty, now and in whatever more independent future.
READ MORE: Scottish distilleries eye zero tariffs on whisky after US-UK trade deal
But there's little doubt in my mind that an unexplained wealth order would trigger this capricious, thin-skinned autocrat. Who could then easily swing one of his many wrecking balls in Scotland's direction.
Whisky and salmon are still labouring under the 10% tariff in this week's US-UK trade deal. Who's to say, if His MAGA-jesty's ire is raised by Scottish lawyers poking around in his financial affairs, that he wouldn't arbitrarily raise tariffs on these key Scottish imports?
Yet Trump's petulant fiats raise deeper questions about business-as-usual, for Scotland as for many other countries.
One of the more startling articles this week seemed to be investigating the effect of Trump's anti-woke zeal on Scottish universities. But it also contained information on how much research is funded by US defence grants.
Between 2012 and 2022, Glasgow University received $9.4 million for research into various forms of drones and 'human performance enhancement'. Edinburgh University took $11.2m for studies that included 'ballistic modifiers' and 'amorphous explosives'. Several more defence millions were brought in across Strathclyde, Heriot-Watt, Aberdeen, Robert Gordon and Dundee universities.
For those of us who took to heart a previous American president's warning about the rise of the 'military-industrial complex', all of that spend is good to know about. And no great loss if it disappears.
What would really make the Eye of Sauron blink is a new Scottish nation-state, setting a timetable to remove Trident nuclear missiles from our soil – still the official policy of the independence-supporting parties, in or out of government.
It was dispiriting to hear the voices of 'SNP insiders' render up wee hard-man quotes to our reporters. 'I was expecting an absolute fucking uproar… Don't get me wrong, you got cybernats online giving it laldy but there wasn't actually that much pushback.'
As ably described by vice-president Grace Penn (The West Wing's Allison Janney) in Netflix's The Diplomat, Scottish nukes are seen by the US state as the last line of deterrence against a naval Russia sweeping through the North Atlantic.
Scottish independence is rendered as a direct and truculent threat to that deterrence. This threat triggers VP Penn's black-ops skullduggery, discovered in the closing episode. (The third series is imminent.)
READ MORE: Labour MP slapped down over claim UK-US trade deal 'great for Scotland'
As I've written several times in this space: what exactly is gained from softening Scottish principle over Trident? There is at least as strong a case to be made on the other side.
In a world recoiling from Trump's strong-arm tactics and toxicity, a Scotland that commits to nuclear prohibition sends an attractive message to hundreds of countries across the globe. Our soft power is profoundly enhanced by our moral removal of the hardest and most exterminist power from our territory.
The other conclusion to draw from this week's series is that Scotland, more than ever in the Trumpian era, needs to find shelter and solidarity in a European context.
The British state's indignities and compromises, involved in working the 'special relationship' with a rapacious, deal-oriented Trump regime, can be avoided if our indy seeks integration with the EU bloc.
The mutating of globalisation into a multi-lateral world, made from vast economic and continental blocs, renders the European Union even more of a haven for a small, progressive nation.
There's also something psychologically beneficial about the project of Scots indy, in the age of Trump. As he conducts his rule-by-whim, we should instead be facing the everyday challenge of arguing for, achieving, and then building an independent country.
Trump offers a slippery, maddening world, where authoritarians win by bemusing the citizenry as to what is true or false. Against this, indy can be our commitment to fact and structure.
That's the majority we need to win, the institutions we must forge, the missiles we should remove, the national resources we can manage and develop.
I believe a Scots indy will face a much more unpredictable, transformative world than any of our current politicians realise. Artificial general (or super) intelligence, and shocks from ecology and the biosphere, may radically upend the working and living norms of societies.
So. do we really want our capacity and our vision for these challenges to be sapped, as we react every time Trump goes to Crazy Town?
There's a fine American invention on my Apple phone called Clean Up. You apply your fingertip to remove an item, or person, from your photos. Up comes Trump at the gate of his mother's house – and now, some swipes later, he's gone.
Would that it were that easy. But it feels good and symbolic. Let's try to take our minds and purpose back from his endless Caligularity.
