“Someday, perhaps when I’m very old, I’ll visit and create something incredibly beautiful there,” Trump stated in 2023, during his New York civil fraud trial, while discussing his future project plans for his estate in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire.

At 79 and having returned to the White House, Trump is seeing part of that promise come to life, as he arrived in Scotland on Friday while his family’s enterprise readies for the August 13 unveiling of a new golf course that carries his name.

Trump’s company’s initial plans for his first Aberdeen-area course called for a luxury hotel and nearby housing.

His business was granted authorization to construct 500 houses, yet Trump implied he might be able to build five times that number and leveraged their projected values for financing without constructing any of the homes, as the lawsuit claimed.

Judge Arthur Engoron found Trump liable last year and ordered his company to pay $US355 million ($541 million) in fines — a judgment that has grown with interest to more than $US510 million ($778 million) as Trump appeals.

Family financial interests aside, Trump isn’t the first sitting US president to golf in Scotland. That was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who played in Turnberry in 1959. George W. Bush visited the famed course at Gleneagles in 2005 but didn’t play.

Many historians trace golf back to Scotland in the Middle Ages. Among the earliest known references to game was a Scottish Parliament resolution in 1457 that tried to ban it, along with soccer, because of fears both were distracting men from practicing archery — then considered vital to national defence.

The first US president to golf regularly was William Howard Taft, who served from 1909 to 1913 and ignored warnings from his predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt, that playing too much would make it seem like he wasn’t working hard enough.

Woodrow Wilson played nearly every day but Sundays, and even had the Secret Service paint his golf balls red so he could practice in the snow, said Mike Trostel, director of the World Golf Hall of Fame.

Warren G. Harding trained his dog Laddie Boy to fetch golf balls while he practiced. Lyndon B. Johnson’s swing was sometimes described as looking like a man trying to kill a rattlesnake.

Bill Clinton, who liked to joke that he was the only president whose game improved while in office, restored a putting green on the White House’s South Lawn. It was originally installed by Eisenhower, who was such an avid user that he left cleat marks in the wooden floors of the Oval Office by the door leading out to it.

Bush stopped golfing after the start of the Iraq war in 2003 because of the optics. Barack Obama had a golf simulator installed in the White House that Trump upgraded during his first term, Trostel said.

John F. Kennedy largely hid his love of the game as president, but he played on Harvard’s golf team and nearly made a hole-in-one at California’s renowned Cypress Point Golf Club just before the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

“I’d say, between President Trump and President John F. Kennedy, those are two of the most skilled golfers we’ve had in the White House,” Trostel said.

Trump, Trostel said, has a handicap index — how many strokes above par a golfer is likely to score — of a very strong 2.5, though he’s not posted an official round with the US Golf Association since 2021.

That’s better than Joe Biden’s handicap of 6.7, which also might be outdated, and Obama, who once described his own handicap as an “honest 13.”

The White House described Trump as a championship-level golfer but said he plays with no handicap.