DONALD TRUMP: Mr T tees off
Donald Trump does not smoke, take drugs, drink alcohol or even allow himself coffee. Nor does he like shaking people’s hands. “Frankly,” he says, “no intelligent person does like shaking hands because you don’t know where those hands have been.”
Most people know where Trump’s hands have been. Apart from on a succession of beautiful women (the bouffanted multimillionaire is on his third gorgeous wife), the Trump fingerprints can be found on luxury hotels, property, office buildings, championship golf clubs, casinos, television programmes, books and all manner of keyring and baseball cap-type merchandise emblazoned with his catchphrase “You’re fired”.
This week his hands are to be found wandering still farther: to Scotland, the birthplace of his mother. Trump will submit a planning application for a £1 billion golf course on the Menie estate in Aberdeenshire which is backed by the Duke of York and which Trump, 60, promises will be “the greatest golf course anywhere in the world”. Environmentalists are worried that the development would disturb wildlife and, given Trump’s reputation for 1980s glitzy, OTT kitsch, connoisseurs of good taste might be more worried still. But Trump is said to be keen to cement his links with Scotland. His mother, Mary MacLeod, was born on the Isle of Lewis and was a 23-year-old Gaelic speaker when she boarded the Transylvania in 1935, bound for America, where she found love with Fred Trump. They were married for 64 years and brought up five children.
Unfortunately Donald’s marriages were not quite so enduring. His first wife, Ivana, a former Czech skiing star by whom he has three children, espoused the large, blonde beehive hairdo satirised by Joanna Lumley’s Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous. Their marriage collapsed in 1990 when Ivana discovered his affair with Marla Maples, who became wife number two. Trump gave Ivana a reported £12 million settlement, giving rise to her famous proclamation: “
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Don’t get mad, get everything!” His marriage to Marla lasted six years and he is now married to Melania Knauss who gave birth to Barron William, Trump’s fifth child, this year.
Trump’s empire has ridden a rollercoaster since the 1980s. During the recession it took him to the edge of bankruptcy four times. But he bounced back with typical gusto. Some fairweather friends who deserted him during the dark days of his business problems and divorce from Ivana have since found their letters returned to them with “f*** off” scrawled across the front.
But it is Trump’s famous comb-forward hairstyle that still elicits most comment. The New York Times once described it as “an elaborate structure best left to an architecture critic”. Trump, ever resilient, said simply: “I think it looks good.”