'He'll use every means at his disposal to make his money. If it means pissing off the locals, he'll have no qualms about it.'

US billionaire displays famed ruthlessness in Scotland and in Manhattan

It must be dispiriting at times to be one of the local Aberdeenshire protesters trying to stop the billionaire Donald Trump from building a £500m golf complex along one of Scotland's finest stretches of dunes. His visit to the site this week has reminded them, if they needed it, that they are pitted against one of the world's most famous and famously ruthless businessmen.

But they should take comfort from the thought that they are not alone. Three thousand miles away, in the rather less rustic location of SoHo in lower Manhattan, a very similar battle is being played out between residents and the Trump phenomenon over his plans to construct a $450m (£220m) condominium. The scheme's opponents say the 46-storey tower would ruin the low-rise nature of the neighbourhood, in much the same way as Aberdeen's antagonists rail against the 950 homes and 45-room hotel envisaged for "Trump Boulevard".

The heartening news for the Scottish campaigners is that Mr Trump's ambitions in New York have provoked an unusual degree of solidarity between neighbourhoods across the city, who are going to the courts in an attempt to stop the development. The bad news is that the tycoon has proved uncannily successful in winning over the city government. "He has been very able at ingratiating himself with the city authorities," said Andrew Berman, director of the historic preservation society for Manhattan's Greenwich Village.

It's Trump's forte, working contacts among the great and the good, using his reputation as a celebrity deal-maker to drive through his designs. He sums up the approach concisely in the title of his forthcoming book: Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life.

It has certainly got him a long way. His background helped: father Fred was a wealthy developer, but most of the elder Trump's property portfolio was in Brooklyn. Young Donald took the family business over the East river into the much more brutal real estate market of Manhattan, where he now owns more than 18m square feet of prime space. From there, he has taken the Trump empire national - with casinos in New Jersey, hotels in Las Vegas and Chicago, golf courses in Florida and Los Angeles - and global, with properties bearing his name in Toronto, Panama City and Dubai. But his headline successes hide a more complicated picture. For a start, no one can agree on precisely how much he is worth. Business magazine Forbes puts him at $3bn, but every year he disputes the figure, claiming his personal wealth is more than twice that.

"He is clearly a very wealthy man, but just how wealthy has always been unclear," says his biographer, Gwenda Blair. "Anyone who has sat down and done the math on what is visible knows that he can't possibly be worth what he says he is." Her book, Donald Trump: Master Apprentice, reminds us that he has come close to business extinction on several occasions. What saved him was his ability to turn himself into an international brand which melded his reputed ruthlessness in business with the glamour of his personal life in the penthouse of Trump Tower (worth $50m on its own) and his succession of beautiful wives: Ivana, Marla and Melania. "It's pretty remarkable, but he has established the Trump brand as someone associated with leading a super-luxury lifestyle."

But what really sent the value of the Trump brand sky-rocketing was the launch of The Apprentice, his leap into television with the famous catch-phrase: "You're fired!" The show is ostensibly about young people competing to work for him, but in reality it is all about Donald Trump. Mark Lamkin, a former competitor on the show, grew in awe of his sharp side: "He will use every means at his disposal to make his money. If that means pissing off the locals, he has no qualms about it."

There is a lesson there for the protesters of Aberdeen, as there is in what happened to comic and TV personality Rosie O'Donnell, who criticised him on air and in the fallout was forced from her job as a presenter of talk show The View. "Trumped, I was," she writes in her new book, Celebrity Detox. "I started to see that he was not a man. That human spirit seemed to have gotten lost to a mechanical repetitive meanness, a push-button person with its circuits askew."

The CV

Born 1946, New York City, son of Fred C and Mary Trump

Education Economics degree, University of Pennsylvania, Wharton school, 1968

Family Married to Ivana Zelnicek, 1977 (divorced 1991), children, Donald Jr, Ivanka, Eric; married to Marla Maples, 1993 (divorced 1999), one child, Tiffany Ariana; married to Melania Knauss, 2005, one child, Barron William
