PRESIDENT Donald Trump may not have admitted it yet, and he may be determined to bait his supporters into taking to the streets and denying the democratic will of the American majority, but he’s going to lose the presidency.
Of the five battleground states yet to declare a winner, Joe Biden is leading four of them.
If Donald Trump wins North Carolina, which he looks set to, he will take the state’s 15 electoral college votes. However, that would put him on just 228, far shy of the 270 needed to win.
If Joe Biden wins Pennsylvania, which he is on course to with 95% of the vote counted, he will become president regardless of the other four undeclared battlegrounds.
As it stands then, and as several news outlets have already called, Biden will be the next president of the United States.
READ MORE: Joe Biden beats Donald Trump to win US presidential election, reports say
Whether that will be good news for the UK Government in Westminster, with Jacob Rees-Mogg having famously said that Trump would be their “greatest ally after Brexit”, remains to be seen.
Whether it will be good news for Scotland seems already decided. A Trump loss means us north of the Border are likely to be seeing a lot more of the man.
The incumbent (soon-to-be-former) president has already said he may have “to leave the country” if Biden wins, and that looks likely to have been more than an off-hand comment.
Remember the Mueller report? The one that looked into Russian interference in the 2016 election and indicted or got guilty pleas from six former Trump advisers, 26 Russian nationals, three Russian companies, one California man, and one London-based lawyer?
Well, they never exonerated Trump. In fact, Mueller said that if the report had shown Trump “clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so".
The only reason Trump seems to have gotten off scot-free is that legal guidelines prevented the indictment of a sitting president.
But what if he’s no longer a sitting president?
And losing the presidency may bring worse than jail for the TV personality turned politician. Without his seat in the Oval Office, Trump will have nothing between him and Twitter’s terms of service.
Although Twitter currently allows world leaders to spout hate speech and incite violence on their platform, as things world leaders do are inherently news-worthy, that special protection will evaporate come Biden’s inauguration.
The platform has already been labelling Trump’s tweets “misleading”, when he’s no longer in charge, they may just ban him altogether.
Trump won’t just lose the White House, he’ll lose something even more precious to him, his 88.4 million followers.
So, assuming he avoids jail, where will Trump be likely to run? Unfortunately, it seems Scotland.
READ MORE: Donald Trump was set to come to Scotland if he lost the last election
As The National reported earlier this week, Trump had plans to fly his private jet over the Atlantic “to play golf at his Turnberry resort” in case he lost against Hilary Clinton in 2016. It’s hard to imagine why this year would be much different.
In fact, the resort’s world famous Ailsa course is booked up this Sunday coming (November 8), and the Tuesday following that. Perhaps he’s planning on using the Monday to head over to Aberdeenshire?
When asked, Turnberry denied having any prominent overseas members booked in to play this weekend, but we wouldn’t have told us Trump was coming either.
Wherever he goes, let’s hope it’s into hiding.
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