If Donald Trump wants to prove that he can make America great again, he should start with something smaller, and see how he gets on making that great again first. Girvan, for instance: the seen-better-days, Scottish seaside town just along the coast from Trump Turnberry, Trump’s Ayrshire golfing resort (given Trump’s habit for constantly referring to himself in the third person and pre-fixing each of his projects with the Trump brand, I’m endlessly amazed that he hasn’t named at least one of his kids ‘Trump Trump’. I suppose Donald Trump Jnr is close enough).

Granted, MGGA doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but at least it’s a simple, achievable task that won’t necessitate the telling of quite so many fibs.

Well… maybe.

“We’re gonna make Girvan so great, we’re gonna take the ‘van’ and make it a truck, we’re gonna take the ‘gir’ and turn it into a ‘raaaaaaar’ and it’s going to be called Raaaaaartruck, and you’re gonna love it, believe me. And there aren’t gonna be any bad dudes from Glasgow, because we’re gonna build a wall… we’re gonna build it in-front of the off-licence. It’s going to be so great.”

Girvan, like most Scottish seaside towns, is a living ghost town, a museum to its own former glory. The occasional picture or shop-front hints at Girvan’s past life as a holiday hot-spot – a sunny mural here, a surf-board in the window there – but juxtaposed with the town’s run-down streets and decaying, salt-chiselled edifices these appear more like ironic art installations than emblems of hope for a revival.

The beach – once alive with thousands of migratory deck-chairs and swirling wind-shields as far as the eye could see – now holds nothing but the whispers of yesteryear carried on the wind along with the shrill caws of seagulls, both poor substitutes for the happy shrieks of children.

I wouldn’t blame you for assuming that I’m hostile to the once-was little town, but the truth is quite the opposite. I love Girvan, precisely because of its faded charm, its wind-swept bleakness, and its exquisite, almost poetic emptiness. I love the deathly stillness of the long, dark roads out of town, where lorries shake and thunder up and down the coast day and night; the rugged splendour of the rocky, wave-battered coastline; how the dark shape of far-off Ailsa Crag shimmers on a summer’s day, as though haunting Girvan from the horizon. It’s an eerily beautiful place; somewhere that lends itself well to writers’ retreats and retirees.

Who knows: perhaps once the Sword of Brexocles falls and punctures the UK’s heart and wallet (hopefully us Scots can cunningly extract ourselves from this brewing Dickensian nightmare tout de suite) stay-cations will supplant cheap package deals as our default holidays, and places like Girvan will rise again. As it stands, it’s pretty hard for old seaside favourites like Girvan to compete against sunnier climes and more aesthetically pleasing locales; it’s even tougher for tourist chiefs to successfully market a lonely outpost on the frontier to nowhere – except, perhaps, to odd fish like me. I can see it now…

“Come to Girvan! There’s nothing here, it’s cold, and it’ll probably rain. But at least it’s not Ayr!”

“Hate people? Sick of bright colours? Want a caravan by the coast so you can just stare at the waves until you die? Come to Girvan!”

And yet when Trump bought Turnberry in 2014 he trumpeted so much, not just for the resort itself but for the surrounding area (claims he also made on a grander scale for Aberdeenshire when he moved his circus into Balmedie): there are going to be jobs, so many jobs, the best jobs, this will be the best golf course the world has ever seen, this is going to put Scotland on the map, it’s going to be great. Believe me.

Etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum.

Of course, back in those pre-presidential days we weren’t as inured to the bullying, blustering, bull-shitting billionaire’s rhetoric, but those with even a cursory interest in and knowledge of Trump’s business ventures over the decades wouldn’t have been at all surprised to learn that only a few short years after purchasing Turnberry from a Dubai-owned consortium the resort would be making heavy losses (despite a few years of tax-breaks from the Scottish government, a loop-hole now closed) and the paint would still be peeling from the walls in nearby Girvan.

Still, you might argue – and technically you’d be correct – that Girvan isn’t Trump’s responsibility. Neither is the village of Turnberry, come to think of it: only the resort itself, which Trump purchased in his capacity as ruthless, billionaire golfing-enthusiast in order to turn a tidy profit.

After all, INEOS doesn’t compensate the dying town of Grangemouth for its triple-prong inconsideration of a) slowly choking its people to death with carcinogens and lung-killing chemicals; b) forcing them to live with the year-round risk of total annihilation; and c) continually lobbying to frack the very ground upon which they walk. They don’t even score cheap power or petrol. Just death and decay (and the occasional sponsored flower bed). So why should Trump give a flying buck (sic) about the condition of Girvan’s promenade, town centre or harbour?

As usual, the US president’s tongue is to blame; especially his puffery, posing, and outrageous claims of greatness and infallibility. Horrifically – for reasons best left to shamans and socio-psychologists to divine – his rhetoric is still capable of making people both old and new to his shtick assume that his messianic business acumen will radiate out from whatever project in which he’s currently investing, and shower the land with gold for miles around.

You would assume a town like Girvan would be instantly transformed by being in such close proximity to a billionaire’s ‘magic touch’, just as I’m sure millions of Americans assumed the same thing about their country when they helped put said billionaire into the Oval Office; namely: incorrectly.

Here’s a handy guide for whenever you’re in doubt about Trump’s intentions: if he says that a project is going to bring a large boost to an area, he means the area around his pocket. The rest is just seduction: a prelude to a fucking. And not the tepid, floppy kind of fucking he gave Stormy Daniels, but a real, strong, and hard fucking. There’s no trickle-down economics in effect here, just a flood of profits first into Trump’s coffers and then straight down the drain.

Trump makes his living building enclaves for the rich and upwardly mobile – walls, if you prefer – that take no account of the world outside of those walls. Raise the drawbridge! Lower the portcullis! Keep out the plebs! When a billionaire businessman acts that way it’s at least understandable, if still unforgiveable. But doing it as the leader of the free world? Not for nothing was Donald Trump the inspiration for Back to the Future’s impulsive, bad-wigged buffoon Biff Tannen. Don’t worry, though. I’m sure he isn’t still actively running his businesses. I’m sure he doesn’t discuss any aspect of his businesses with his sons who are now running those businesses. I’ll bet they don’t even mention it. Even when Donald Trump is staying in one of them playing golf.

Still: jobs, right? Jobs, jobs, jobs. It’s all about those jobs. Sometimes it’s about keeping the trains running on time, but it’s always about those jobs. Trump Turnberry, of course, employs a great number of people from Girvan and the nearby town of Maybole, which can only be a positive by-product of Trump’s investment in the area, right? Well. Right. Still I don’t know how keen I’d be to work for a family dynasty headlined by a would-be dictator who was formerly famous for humiliating and firing twenty-nine out of every thirty people stupid enough to walk into his building and on to his TV show. Besides, Trump’s trademark style of smash and grab, hit and run, makes it more likely that when his resort fails or haemorrhages too much of his interest he’ll drop those employees as if they were nothing more than members of his Whitehouse inner circle.

The people of Turnberry appear to love Trump, as businesses there get the chance to grow fat bottom-feeding from the big fish in their tiny pond. When protestors arrived at the resort last week to welcome Donald Trump with pointing and placards (and a paraglider that carried a message proclaiming Trump to be WELL BELOW PAR straight to Turnberry’s front door as the president and a hundred snipers glared on) many of Turnberry’s older residents worked to counter-balance the angry sentiment. One resident even proudly displayed the stars and stripes in his garden, for which he allegedly earned shouts of ‘Nazi’ – this, though, was reported in The Times, which is owned by Trumpy’s good old pal Rupert Murdoch.

The right-wing press, and its legions of supporters in online comment threads across social media, were quick to paint last week’s anti-Trump protesters in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow (and, of course, Turnberry itself) as – variously but not exhaustively – a national disgrace, a howling embarrassment, a flock of hypocritical sheep, and a bunch of left-wing hippies in dire need of a wash and a job. Why don’t they ever protest Putin or Saudi Princes? Haven’t they done much worse to human beings in general? Why only pick on good ol’ Trump? And how dare they protest a foreign president at all. None of their bloody business!

Then there are those who were broadly sympathetic towards and supportive of the protesters’ aims, but wondered if it was all a bit futile. After all, if Trump doesn’t care about demos on the streets of New York, he’s hardly likely to lose any sleep over a protest in George Square, Glasgow. Or, as Scottish comedian Jamie Dalgleish put it in a very funny Facebook joke:

“Amazing that Trump has finally resigned because Fraser from Newton Mearns held up a placard saying “BOLT YA FANDAN ROCKET BAWS”.

I understood why the protestors protested, though. Donald Trump may not be our president, but some sections of our media treat him as such – Murdoch’s muck-rags especially. Also, because we here in the UK speak the same language, have spent decades watching the same movies and TV shows, and share a lot of the same values and history, many of us feel a greater connection and affinity with America and Americans than we do with people from some other countries (I say ‘many of us’ because I recognise that many sections of British society feel no affinity with America or Americans, a reflection of the increasingly multi-cultural world in which we now live), so we feel partly responsible for Trump’s tenure, if only by-proxy.

Perhaps, though, the messages on the placards (some of which were genuinely very funny) were ultimately displayed for the benefit of our own crooked politicians, who may be plotting quietly to privatise and sell off our country’s assets and morals as part of a future trade deal with Donald Trump.

At least now they know they won’t be able to do it without a fight.

I and my family (my partner and two young children, Jack and Christopher) last visited Girvan in August 2017, staying in a friend’s lodge in a caravan park on the outskirts of town for a week. I was very curious to learn how the townspeople felt about having Trump – or some essence of him (ewww) – on their doorstep now that he was US President. This fact-finding mission was undertaken much to the consternation of my partner, who cringes with embarrassment whenever I try to ‘interview’ strangers whilst in her company, especially considering that I’m not only a reporter without a notepad, but a correspondent without a newspaper. I’m just a guy who likes knowing things. Knowing things is good. And if we don’t ask things then we won’t know things and if we don’t know things then… well, we’re Donald Trump.

We ate brunch one day in a café called Tartans & Tweeds, an eatery that could only have been made to appear more Scottish had its owners renamed it Heroin & Irn Bru. To get to the dining area we first had to walk through a repository of handbags, wallets, purses, and gloves; and also towers of tartan-covered tat, the kind of stuff – one would hope – that only non-Scottish people with an eye for the twee would ever dare buy.

Once seated, we ordered a medley of fried foods (we fed the kids fruit, sandwiches and salads we’d brought with us, lest you think us unforgivably Scottish). Our order included square sausage, because of course it did. It’s our patriotic duty. For some reason we Scots draw fierce national pride from the geometric shape into which we cut our dead pigs and cows. I wonder if any other country does this:

“Welcome to Bulgaria. Come for the cheap drink and sunshine: stay for the dodecahedronic lamb.”

Kids are better than any NUJ card for loosening people’s tongues. If you’re with a kid, especially if you’re holding a kid, people make the knee-jerk assumption that you must be a nice guy (unless you’re holding said kid in a head-lock) and tend to trust you more readily – hence why cynical politicians of yesteryear were usually to be found cradling babies in public when elections were looming.

Our kids’ boisterous behaviour got us talking to a grandmother at the next table, a short, fierce woman with short, fierce white hair. She seemed loving and caring, but in a stern, no-nonsense, very Scottish kind of a way; the sort of granny who instead of smiling beatifically and fetching you a nice cup of tea and a biscuit, would denounce her neighbours as bastards, decry the state of the country and ask you what the hell you intended to do about it – and then demand to know what sort of an excuse was “But, granny, I’m only four”?!

After a brief preamble, I got down to business.

“How does everybody feel about Trump around here?” I asked her.

She pursed her lips tightly together. “Well, we don’t like him.”

“Why?” I asked, wondering if he’d perpetrated a specific outrage upon the town, a la Balmedie, where the bulldozers and the bullying and the building bunds around people’s houses had made him a local hate figure long before he’d become a global one.

But it was nothing so specific or complicated.

“For the same reason the rest of the world doesn’t like him,” said the old woman, looking at me as if I was daft. “He’s a bloody idiot.”

She recounted a tale, which may have been apocryphal, of Trump looking out of the windows of the newly acquired Trump Turnberry at the ocean vista before him, and scowling angrily as he noticed cars and coaches moving along the public road next to his property. “What are those vehicles doing on my road?” he asked his people. “Can we move them?”

“Och,” the granny said, gritting her teeth together and shaking her head, “Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will take a shot at him.”

To give some context to her pro-assassination stance, the infamous ‘fire and fury’ incident had only just occurred that month, and many believed that Trump was about to usher in a new and final era of nuclear Armageddon, so I guess we can forgive granny a little of her zeal. Besides, more than half the planet probably agreed with her.

Even though I laughed – partly at the shock of this assertive but sweet old lady openly advocating murder – she probably felt that she’d gone too far, and moved to balance the scales by telling a story that highlighted The Donald’s good side.

A man she knew had booked at Turnberry for a meal and some drinks with clients, but when they arrived Trump himself was still using the room, so they had to wait well over an hour – possibly two – before being seated. Trump apologised by way of waiving the cost of their meals and letting them drink all evening for free.

“He won’t hear a bad word against Donald Trump now,” said the woman with a roll of her eyes and a shrug.

Money talks, granny.

In the Zen surfing shop – Surfing Buddha – a few doors down from Tartans & Tweeds, I detected a few ever-so-subtle indications that the owner didn’t have tickets for the Trump Train, either. A giant net was fastened to the ceiling, inside of which dangled a shark wearing a MAGA hat, and a severed Donald Trump head: wide-eyed, dead and orange.

I pointed to the display above my head as I approached the owner at the counter, “I was going to ask what you really thought about Donald Trump…?”

He smiled.

I did, however, ask about the viability of a year-round surf-shop in Girvan, and I could tell from his wearied, slightly defensive response that I hadn’t been the first to ask him that question.

“We sell a lot more than surfing stuff in here,” he said. “People will just scoff, or stand outside and take pictures of the sign without bothering to come in and take a look, see what we do.”

I nodded, and opined that some people were too blinkered to open their minds long enough to engage with, and question, the world around them, and then instantly felt guilty because a few minutes before I’d almost kept walking after standing outside taking pictures of his sign and scoffing at it.

His shop was really cool, with a beautiful ethos that was the polar opposite of Trumpism. In the back room of the shop the owner operated a cafe, selling hot drinks, biscuits and snacks and asking customers only to pay what they could afford, from zero upwards. With Trumpism, zero is all the little guy ever gets.

The owner let my eldest son, Jack, play the piano that was positioned on the periphery of the cafe, which put us all in a happy mood.

“Let’s all go to Turnberry and check out Trump’s hotel!” I suggested, rather dampening the happy mood.

We bundled the kids into the car and drove along the coast to Turnberry, parking the car on the road so we could get out and take pictures.

The stone fountain on the lawn outside the clubhouse is usually the first thing that draws your eye as you reach the fringes of the resort. It’s ostentatious to say the least. A Greco-Roman warrior stands atop a circle of lions, themselves held aloft by yet more lions. It’s striking, but I couldn’t help wonder if it would’ve been better suited to a Vegas hotel with a chorus of can-can girls dancing around it.

It’s quite telling that Trump would commission, or at least approve, such a statue, given what we now know about his predilection for brutal regimes, iron-fisted autocrats and chest-smacking shows of strength. He must see himself as that ripped warrior with the pointy-stick, staring imperiously over the heads of the plebs bowing at his feet. Anyone want to help give those lions a leg up?

There were golfers everywhere, more checked trousers than a Rupert the Bear convention. Golfers tend to dig Trump. The one thing Trump appears to be indisputably good at is building world-class golf courses: it’s just everything else he has trouble with.

Behind us, up on the hill, stood Trump Turnberry itself, a magnificent, imposing building that brought to mind the Overlook hotel in The Shining. Perhaps its shinier cousin.

“Will we go up and take a look around?” I asked my partner.

She pulled a face. “We’re not playing golf. They won’t let us in.”

“It’s like any hotel, anywhere,” I said. “You can just walk in off the street and have a coffee, sandwich, whatever. We don’t have to be playing golf.”

“But they’ll know we’re poor.”

I laughed. “They won’t know that.” I looked down at my clothes. “Well… maybe they will know that. But we’re still entitled to have a nose around. It’s a free country, let’s go.”

I’d taught Jack how to do a pretty good Donald Trump face – lips petted and pushed out, eyes drawn into a scowl formation – some time before, and the main reception at the Trump Turnberry hotel seemed as good a time as any to try it out in public. The ladies behind the desk laughed good-naturedly, but there was a nervous glint in their eyes, as if they feared that at any moment Trump would leap out from behind a potted plant and shout “You’re fired!” at them.

The décor of the arterial corridors leading to the heart of the hotel harked back to a time before taste and decorum, the carpets and colour scheme colluding to create a unique style I’m content to christen ‘blind 1970s grandmother chic’. The interior seemed to scream ‘The Shining’, too. That movie haunted me when I was a child. Imagine how much more terrifying it would be with Donald Trump front and centre. 

‘Heeeeeerrrrrrreeeee’s Donny!’

ALL POLITICS AND NO PUSSY MAKES DONALD A DULL BOY (BUT STILL GREAT, I’M SO GREAT, YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE HOW GREAT I AM)

PS: He’d fuck the corpse in room 237. No question.

Jack ran around in one of the big empty ballrooms like a greyhound hurtling round a race-track, and I must confess – giant child that I am – I followed his lead.

My partner seethed at me through clenched teeth. “You can’t do that here.”

“Where’s the sign that says that?” I asked, adding: ‘wheeeeeeeeeeeee’.

“We’ll be thrown out,” she pleaded.

“We won’t be thrown out for this,” I laughed, “but if we do, what a funny story we’ll have to tell!”

She took no comfort from that.

Jack kept running, but I stopped, because I was an unfit 37-year-old man who didn’t want to be seen dead in Donald Trump’s hotel.

As we walked around – peeking in here, peering in there – we noticed that we were being followed, and being asked incredibly frequently by various members of staff if we were okay, and if we needed anything, far more times than was strictly necessary even for a swanky resort hotel with a top-tier commitment to customer service. The staff must’ve been trained to sniff out the paupers, the subversives, and the potential reporters, I guess. Contrary to what I said earlier, carrying your kids around with you doesn’t always put you above suspicion.

I did manage to ask a female member of staff some questions as she took our order for a cup of coffee in one of the restaurants, like: who the hell buys bottles of wine that cost thousands of pounds (a far cry from the offerings at Surfing Buddha), and have you ever met Donald Trump? She said she hadn’t, but Eric Trump was at Turnberry quite a lot, and he was ‘very nice’. I checked her face to see if she was Rupert Murdoch wearing a mask. She checked mine to see if I was Eric Trump wearing a mask.

A few minutes later Jack, our eldest boy, needed a number two, so I huckled him down a corridor to the gents’ bathroom like I was a secret service agent and he was the President: a tiny little Trump on a dump run. The bathroom was opulent in an understated way – if that isn’t too much of a contradiction in terms – an impression only partly spoiled by the smell of my son’s excrement unfurling into the air. The sink unit was marbled in a Greek revival colour scheme, with a row of mirrors hanging above it that seemed to share some ancestry with the magic mirror used by Snow White’s evil Queen to seek out rivals. The rest of the room was uniformly striking-white, with only a landscape picture of a rugged canyon upsetting the minimalist tone. There were also bundles of dinky hand towels, each wrapped like a scroll and made from the finest Egyptian cotton. A little of the spirit of Frasier Crane entered my body as I reached out to grab one from the bowl and…

“Finished, Daddy!” came the cry from my son’s toilet stall.

And, no, I didn’t use the finest Egyptian cotton cloth to wipe my son’s bottom as part of some dirty protest against Trump, although I appreciate from previous experience of reading my work why you might be tempted to assume such a thing. Bum wiped, hands washed, we came back out into the corridor, where my partner and youngest son, Christopher, were nowhere to be seen.

Christ, I thought. This really is The Shining.

A few moments later they emerged from the female toilets. My partner had decided to duck into the bathroom to avoid the scrutiny of yet another member of staff who’d twice asked her if she and the baby were okay.

“What was the ladies’ bathroom like?” I asked.

“Plush,” she said.

“Mine, too.”

“The tiles were nice,” she said.

“The tiles were nice,” I agreed. “Did you see the…”

She unzipped the baby’s nappy-bag so I could see inside. “I stole this cloth!” she said excitedly.

“Me too!” I said, yanking mine out from the sleeve of my jacket.

We high-fived and stared lovingly at each other.

Maybe Trump will never Make Girvan Great Again. Maybe he’ll make it worse. Maybe one day he’ll end the world and all life on earth. Maybe no-one will ever make him pay for any of the things he’s done.

But our house was two tiny hand-towels up.

It’s a small victory, granted, but I guess that’s the only kind of victory we’re ever going to get against Trump until the world either comes to its senses, or dies trying. The man could stand in-front of a camera and admit he’d beaten a man to death with the corpse of a second dead man, while sixty kids looked on from cages, and he wouldn’t meet any real resistance or consequences. He uses people, and they try to use him, to trade on his power and ubiquity. Just like I am now in writing this article. I guess I’m bottom-feeding, too. He’s the devil, and everyone in his orbit makes a deal with him. That’s what makes him almost impossible to stop.

What was that? You were expecting me to meet Trump at some point over the course of this article?

Ah, I see why you might think that. Because I called the article ‘Making Girvan Great Again: Meeting Trump at Turnberry,’ right?

What’s a little fake news between friends?