Scottish leader: Rumored Trump trip off course
LONDON — President Donald Trump has not said where he plans to go after leaving the White House on Jan. 20. But the leader of Scotland made clear Tuesday that Trump is not welcome in her country.
Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, said that under newly imposed virus restrictions, which prohibit all but essential travel, a visit by the president to one of his Scottish golf resorts, Trump Turnberry, would not be acceptable.
Rumors that Trump would head for Scotland flared after a Scottish paper reported that an American military version of a Boeing 757 — sometimes used by Trump — was scheduled to land at a nearby airport Jan. 19, the day before Joe Biden is to be sworn in as president.
“We are not allowing people to come into Scotland,”
Sturgeon told reporters in Edinburgh, “and that would apply to him just as it applies to anybody else — and coming in to play golf is not what I would consider to be an essential purpose.”
On Monday, she imposed a lockdown on Scotland, which, like England, is battling a surge in coronavirus cases because of a new variant.
The White House initially declined to comment on the report, first published in Scotland’s Sunday Post paper, but later denied it.
“This is not accurate,” press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Tuesday.
Trump has owned the Trump Turnberry resort since 2014 and has long thought of it as an escape. Last summer, Turnberry came under scrutiny after Robert Wood Johnson IV, the U.S. ambassador to Britain, told colleagues that Trump asked him to see if the British government could steer the British Open to its links.