The Trumptown saga continues.

What bothers me the most about the whole affair is the speed with which the Scottish government involved itself. The “call in” happened just a bit too fast to be due process. Surely some pressure was placed on them.

Having been in the US for a couple of years now, I think I can safely accuse the Americans of the bad practice of wanting everything done yesterday. Everything has to happen as fast as possible. Delays are always the fault of someone else slowing the process down. If the job is not done at superhuman speed, then someone must be deliberately sabotaging the process so the competitors can get ahead. Corners can be cut willy nilly to get the job done fast. And that’s in academia – historically one of the slowest fields. Imagine the speed of things in the heady world of property development. The Trump team will probably be a prime example of doing whatever it takes to close the deal asap. That’s not a surprise.

What is surprising is that the Scottish government feels the need to circumvent the usual appeals process and deal with the rejected plan so soon. It is surprising that they feel the need to accommodate the Trump team to the extent of not following procedure. The council must have rejected the property plan for good reasons. While I’ve not had a chance to find out what those are yet, if I were the Scottish government, I’d look into that first and ignore outside lobbying until they’ve had some impartial advice. In particular, the hurrying by the Trump team should not be heeded; Donald Trump’s spokesperson was quoted as saying:

“These attacks are more than misguided; they are malicious, inaccurate and potentially destructive and they threaten to once again endanger a £1 billion project which has the overwhelming backing of the North-east of Scotland.”

A cynic would read between the lines and translate their statement as a threat: “If you keep interfering with our deal, we’re taking it off the table and screw you silly Scots for not wanting our easy money.”

I say: ignore them. We expect our politicians to make their decisions:

“steadily, sensibly, never too quickly, never too slowly”