Donald Trump Praises Scotland for Taking 'Country Back' -- Even Though It Voted to Remain
— -- Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, in Scotland for a two-day business trip, today praised United Kingdom voters for taking “their country back,” even though a majority of Scots indicated they wanted to remain part of the E.U.
Trump compared the U.K. referendum vote, “dubbed Brexit,” to America’s presidential election. "People really see a big parallel," he noted today at a news conference at his Turnberry golf course.
“What I like is that I love to see people take their country back. And that's really what's happening in the United States,” Trump said.
Across the U.K., 52 percent voted to leave the 28-member bloc, while 48.1 percent voted to stay. But there was a notably different result in Scotland, where 62 percent voted to stay and 38 percent to leave.
Before today’s news conference, Trump tweeted that Scotland was "going wild" over the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union, despite Scotland's preference to remain in the E.U.
”Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote," Trump tweeted.
He added: “They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games!”
On the global impact of Brexit, Trump told reporters today this will happen “more and more,” pointing to Germany specifically and its refugee crisis. Trump also argued that the E.U. “looks like it's on its way” to breaking up.
“You are going to have, I think, many other cases where they want to take their borders back,” Trump said. “They want to take their monetary back. They want to take a lot of things back. They want to be able to have a country again.”
When asked how leaders should unite, Trump answered, “You unite people by having a happy country.”
“When people pour into the country and it doesn't work, whether it's because of crime or, you know, various other things,” he continued. “So you can't unite a country by forcing things down the people's throats and that's what happened here.”
Breaking with old tradition that "politics stops at the water's edge," Trump then predicted that the Brexit vote would have gone differently if President Obama hadn’t urged Britain to remain in the E.U.
"But I was actually very surprised that President Obama would have come over here; he would have been so bold as to tell the people over here what to do," Trump said. "And I think that a lot of people don’t like him. I think if he had not said it; I think your results might have been different. But when he said it, people were not happy about it. And I thought it was totally inappropriate."
Trump isn’t traveling with his foreign advisers, but said he was in touch with them, although admitting, “There's nothing to talk about.”
He will continue his trip in Scotland Saturday with a visit to his other golf course and resort property in Aberdeen.
