Outgoing President Donald Trump will be leaving office by the end of the month, no matter whether he admits to the reality of his election loss to President-elect Joe Biden. As rumors spread that Trump might visit one of his Scottish golf courses during Biden’s inauguration back in the U.S., Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said that Trump would not be “allowed” to visit the country just to play golf, as summarized by The Independent. Travel restrictions are currently in place for visitors to Scotland amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic, with travelers needing what Sturgeon characterized as an “essential” reason to enter the country.
Sturgeon commented as follows:
‘I have no idea what Donald Trump’s travel plans are, you’ll be glad to know. I hope and expect that – as everybody expects, not everybody necessarily will hope – that the travel plan immediately that he has is to exit the White House. But beyond that I don’t know. We are not allowing people to come in to Scotland without an essential purpose right now and that would apply to him, just as it applies to anybody else. Coming to play golf is not what I would consider to be an essential purpose.’
Traditionally, outgoing presidents attend the inauguration of their successors — then-outgoing President Barack Obama was, for instance, at Trump’s own inauguration. Trump has refused to extend the same courtesy to his successor, insisting with no legitimate supporting evidence that fraud swung the race away from him. Trump has repeatedly insisted that, in actuality, he himself won the election, despite the fact that every state has now long since certified its presidential election results, confirming Biden’s win. Trump and his allies like Rudy Giuliani have alleged that Democratic fraudsters “rigged” the election, but they have largely failed to comprehensively map out how this imaginary fraud even took place. Who was in charge? Barack Obama? Hillary Clinton? Aliens?
Troublingly, Trump’s refusal to accept the reality of the election outcome doesn’t merely make him look, again, like an egomaniac. Republicans are falling in line behind his authoritarian crusade, and a significant number of the party’s members of Congress have announced plans to object to the certification of Biden’s electoral college victory when Congress meets to certify the numbers on Wednesday. Although throwing out any electoral votes would require the agreement of majorities of both houses of Congress, and Democrats control the House, many Republicans are still showing their willingness to — in actuality — trample democracy, no matter what other excuses that they provide.
