One of the reasons for Donald Trump’s baffling dominance of the polls in the Republican presidential race is the fear factor. The billionaire property developer preys on American voters’ fears over immigration and the perceived threat of terrorism.

As I discovered while making the films You’ve Been Trumped and A Dangerous Game, fear was also at play when Trump came to Scotland in 2007 – he preyed on politicians’ fears that North Sea oil was running out. Business leaders in Aberdeen responded to his promise of 6,000 jobs through the building of a luxury Trump golf resort, as “the second coming of oil”. And one of the first in line to talk up the development was Alex Salmond.

Last week, in an extraordinary outburst, the former Scotland first minister branded Donald Trump “three times a loser” after the UK supreme court rejected the billionaire’s attempt to block the construction of a wind farm near his golf course.

Salmond’s attack bounced off Trump, who has long considered the former SNP leader an irrelevance. But Salmond’s comments were a deep insult to people living close to the Trump development, in Salmond’s own constituency.

Back in 2007, when Trump first detailed plans for his $1.5bn luxury resort on the rare sand dunes that form part of the Menie estate, Salmond was busy courting Trump. The development was in his Gordon constituency, after all, which he had taken in May of that year, prior to becoming first minister.

Every credible environmental group in the land was objecting to the Trump development, warning that it would destroy a protected site of special scientific interest (SSSI), but Salmond was wining and dining with Trump in New York.

The scientists said the unique, moving dunes on which Trump wanted to build were “the crown jewels” of our natural heritage. Yet Salmond appeared on TV news programmes defending the development, saying environmental concerns were outweighed by the economic benefits and the thousands of jobs that would flow from it.

Aberdeenshire council threw out Trump’s plans in November 2007 but Salmond subsequently met Trump representatives at an Aberdeen hotel. Shortly afterwards, his government “called in” the Trump proposal, claiming it was “in the national interest” of Scotland for the development to receive consideration through a government-backed inquiry.

A year later, the golf development was given the green light by Salmond’s cabinet secretary for finance, John Swinney. And with that decision, a new chapter began in the living nightmare endured by local residents, who had refused to sell their homes to Trump to make way for his golf course.

When I began filming my documentary You’ve Been Trumped in 2009, bulldozers swiftly moved on to an environmentally sensitive site and began ripping up trees and burying them in crater-like holes. Trump was giving press conferences where he accused a local farmer, Michael Forbes, of living like “a pig”, and called his home “a slum”, threatening to pull the plug on a planned luxury hotel for the resort if Forbes “didn’t clean up his property”.

Another local resident, Susan Munro, explained to me on camera how she had been forced to spreadeagle over the bonnet of her car by Trump security guards, while attempting to reach her home. At the crack of dawn, an army of diggers lurched into action to build a massive wall of earth around the home of resident David Milne, whose house Trump said he wanted to get rid of. While all this was going on, Salmond was nowhere to be seen, despite driving by the development every week en route to the Holyrood parliament in Edinburgh from his constituency.

In the summer of 2010, we discovered that Trump’s workers had accidentally cut off the water to the homes of Michael Forbes and his wife Sheila, and of Michael’s mother Molly, which is served by a private well. During an interview at Trump Tower in New York, Trump told me that Molly “reminds me of my mother”. Yet Molly, who is now 91 years old, was forced to retrieve her water from a nearby stream with a bucket and push it to her home in a wheelbarrow.

Despite claims from the Trump Organisation that it would restore the Forbes’ water, this appalling situation continues to this day, as I discovered recently while filming for a new documentary. For five years, the widow Molly, whom Trump previously threatened with legal action, has been denied a safe and reliable water supply. And what has Salmond done to help her? Nothing. The Trump Organisation claims it is not their problem. So does the Scottish government.

The quiet courage and dignity of the Menie estate residents, have inspired communities around the world faced with similar pressures from greedy developers, as I documented in A Dangerous Game. The residents stood up for an environment that Salmond’s government failed to protect. This was recognised in Scotland, when Michael Forbes won the Top Scot award in 2012 Tens of thousands of people voted for him over the Wimbledon tennis champion, Andy Murray, and the comedian Billy Connolly. Yet when the Trump Organisation issued a statement branding the Menie estate residents “a national embarrassment to Scotland”, there was no rebuke from Salmond’s office at the time – just a deafening silence.

Trump’s development, in Aberdeenshire, employs fewer than 100 people and has lost millions of pounds since it opened. But only now has Salmond decided to dump on Trump – his comments triggered by a London court decision about a wind farm rather than the plight of his constituents.

Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University has finally seen sense, and stripped Trump of an honorary degree given in 2010, in protest at the tycoon’s call to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

While Salmond may be admired as a shrewd political operator, his willingness to cosy up to Trump over a development that contained wildly optimistic economic projections has resulted in the destruction of a unique stretch of coastline for generations to come.