A Dangerous Game: Donald Trump vs. the Environment

Donald Trump's role as the Republican party's nominee for U.S. president makes this a timely documentary, since it looks at Trump's golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland (which served as a backdrop for Trump's musings to the press about the Brexit vote earlier this year), although the film spends as much time assessing the environmental costs of golf courses in other parts of the world. A Dangerous Game serves as a solid follow-up to filmmaker Anthony Baxter's You've Been Trumped (VL-5/13), which clearly got under the billionaire developer's skin enough that Trump here grudgingly gives Baxter an interview. Before that happens, however, the price of Trump's blind ambition to drop his large footprint on anything and anyone he wants is captured in an astonishing tale of how his luxury golf course and hotel in Aberdeenshire came to be. Nestled against Scotland's coast, the fragile ecology of rare sand dunes was completely wiped out by the arrival of an always-green grass course that requires enormous amounts of water and chemicals. And that's just the environmental damage; the film also captures the significant harm that Trump did to the farmers, retirees, and other longtime residents of the area, whose properties, physical infrastructure (e.g., underground pipes that brought water to their homes), personal freedom (security forces harass them on their own land), and reputations (Trump denounced them as “slum”-dwellers and “disgusting”) were badly hit. Baxter examines similar tactics by other developers in Dubrovnik, Croatia (where officials rammed a golf course project down the throats of residents who voted overwhelmingly against it); the Hamptons (actor Alec Baldwin discusses his and other activists' failed mission to stop development of an environmentally hazardous course); and China (where a growing mania for golf is causing havoc in the natural world). Part of the problem, in Baxter's view, is what exclusive-membership, luxury golf courses represent in terms of social and economic inequality, locking up increasingly scant resources (such as water) to create playgrounds for the rich. Baxter is a little soft on Trump during the face-to-face conversation, but otherwise this is fine activist documentary. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (T. Keogh)