Is Donald Trump really planning to flee the country on Inauguration Day?

| 7:00 pm EST January 4, 2021
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Awhile back Palmer Report spelled out how if Donald Trump wants to flee the country to avoid criminal prosecution, he’ll first need to come up with a mundane excuse to visit a non-suspicious country while he still has the protection of being in office. Then from there he’ll need to sneak into a country without an extradition treaty.

Now a Scottish newspaper called the Sunday Post has a source at Prestwick Airport who claims that Donald Trump’s personal jumbo jet is scheduled to land at the airport on January 19th – the day before Inauguration Day – for a vacation at his golf resort there. This comes with a number of caveats about whether this source is believable and so on. But it sure is interesting.

If true, it would mean that Trump really is leaving the country just hours before he ceases being President. It would mean he’s indeed taking a mundane trip to a non-suspicious country just as his presidential trappings and immunity run out. If he were fleeing, this would be step one.

Of course this doesn’t mean that he’s fleeing. Maybe he’s just so embarrassed about losing, he wants to be out of the country while President Biden is being inaugurated. And when you consider Scottish Parliament’s recent rumblings about investigating Trump for money laundering at his golf resort there, maybe he just wants to visit it one more time before it’s potentially taken away from him.

The thing to keep an eye on would be whether he comes back. If Trump travels to Scotland on January 19th and decides to remain at his Turnberry resort indefinitely, it might suggest that he’s hoping to be out of the country whenever New York ends up dropping criminal indictments on him. Of course Scotland would extradite him back to the U.S. in a heartbeat, but not until he’s been indicted. Trump’s play would be to try to sneak out of Scotland, and into Russia or wherever he’s fleeing to, just before the indictments land.

But that’s several steps ahead of the plot. For now we don’t even know if this reporting about Prestwick Airport is legitimate; he may not even really be going to Scotland. And even if he is, Trump is such a tepid decision maker, he could end up changing his mind between now and the 19th.

It’s just interesting that, after we laid out the specific hypothetical steps Trump would need to take in order to try to flee the country, there’s now reporting about him taking what would be step one. In any case, Trump is such a bumbler, we imagine that if he did try to flee, he’d screw it up and end up stuck living on a mattress in some embassy basement while awaiting extradition. This is not going to end with some Trump magic carpet ride where he ends up living happily ever after. He’s not even close to being capable of pulling that off.