Has Donald Trump’s Scottish golf course blown a hole in his defence?

Keeping up with the number of charges against Donald Trump is a lot like counting the luxury properties he has built around his vast Scottish golf course. Except with one crucial difference.

In the first case, that number should be zero: presidential candidates really shouldn’t be facing more lawsuits and criminal investigations than anyone can keep track of. And in the second, that number is also zero – when it ought to be in the thousands.

According to court documents, New York’s attorney general believes the former president has lied about how rich he is, with specific regard to Trump International Scotland, the seafront Aberdeenshire resort he opened in 2012.

The original plans had included a 450-room hotel, 950 holiday apartments, 36 golf villas and 500 houses – some 2,000 properties in all. However, more than a decade on from the grand opening, a very large number of these guest rooms still only exist as “plans”, not actual, you know, buildings, meaning that the resort has been overvalued by around £164m.

That such an oversight should count as “fraud” is more than backed up by other similar findings in the same action. Trump also stands accused of overvaluing his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, by – wait for it – 2,300 per cent; and claiming that his New York penthouse is three times larger than it actually is.

Could this all be just oversight, as Trump has claimed? Well, the judge in the case, a man called Arthur Engoron, has expedited matters somewhat by making some preliminary rulings of his own, one of which, and this is verbatim, goes as follows: “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real-estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud.”

The central problem in US politics, and this has not changed for some time now, is that a clear majority of Republican Party members and voters really do believe that the 2020 election was “stolen” – and so, by default, believe that it is Donald Trump’s sacred duty to restore democracy to America, when what he is actually doing is trying to destroy it.

American politics can’t be fixed until that number of stolen-election believers among Republicans goes below 50 per cent – and, ideally, all the way down to zero.

How you get there is really not easy. If the last three years are not sufficient, then what can be? You would hope that a judge patiently pointing out that it is implausible that a successful real-estate developer is capable of honestly overstating the size of his own home by a factor of three, then it might prise open the door, just a fraction, and let in the light that will light all the way back to reality.

These people tend to believe that the never-ending allegations against their hero are precisely what he calls them, a “witch-hunt”. That people are out to get him for political reasons.

The charges filed against Trump are now so numerous and so complex, they are almost too easy for his fans to ignore wholesale. But you can’t ignore the 2,000 guest rooms on a Scottish golf course that just aren’t there. Not unless you really, really want to.