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Former U.S. President Donald Trump is in Scotland to open a new golf course at his resort near Aberdeen

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MEG KINNARD Associated Press

May 1, 2023, 8:31 AM ET

3 min read

Former U.S. President Donald Trump traveled to Scotland on Monday to open a new golf course at his resort near Aberdeen, in his first overseas trip since he was indicted in New York on criminal charges in a hush money scheme.

Trump and his son Eric were greeted by two pipers, a red carpet and a 10-vehicle motorcade at Aberdeen International Airport as they stepped off his private jet with an American flag painted on the tailfin.

Its great to be home this was the home of my mother, Trump said. His late mother, Mary, was born on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides before immigrating to the United States.

Trump's trip coincides with the second week of a Manhattan civil trial over accusations he raped former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room in 1996. He denies the allegation and has not attended the trial, which is expected to last through the week.

It's his first trip abroad since he became the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges. He pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a court appearance last month. No travel restrictions were placed on him as a condition of release, provided that he shows up in court for required appearances.

The hush money case is just one of several investigations that could result in criminal charges for Trump as he campaigns for a return to the White House. His 2024 bid was top of mind as he previewed his trip to Aberdeen on his social media site.

Will be meeting with many wonderful friends, and cutting a ribbon for a new and spectacular second course in Aberdeen, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. Very exciting despite the fact that it is make America great again that is on my mind, in fact, America will be greater than ever before.

Trump's visit to Scotland comes shortly after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, considered his top rival for the 2024 presidential nomination, returned home from his own international trip. DeSantis, looking to burnish his foreign policy credentials, visited Japan, South Korea, Israel and the United Kingdom along with his wife, Casey.

As he nears a presidential bid of his own, DeSantis' trip differed from Trump's in that it was aimed at generating lucrative business deals and also boosting the governor's diplomatic resume ahead of an expected presidential run.

While some allies initially believed DeSantis might wait until as late as early summer to enter the race, they now expect him to announce as early as this month. Florida's GOP-dominated Legislature recently gave approval to a measure that would tweak state law to allow DeSantis to run for president without resigning from the governorship.

When he leaves Scotland, Trump will head to his golf course in Doonbeg on Irelands west coast.

During his presidency, Trump came under intense scrutiny for frequenting properties he owns and profits from, giving them taxpayer-funded publicity and running up millions of dollars in taxpayer costs. In 2019, then-Vice President Mike Pence stayed at Trump's Doonbeg hotel at taxpayers' expense, defending his decision by saying it was a logical choice because of "the unique footprint that comes with our security detail and other personnel.

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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP

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Trump travels to Scotland to open golf course amid NY trial - ABC News

Lawyers for Donald J. Trump on Monday pushed back against an effort by the Manhattan district attorneys office to limit the former presidents ability to publicly discuss evidence in the criminal case against him.

The district attorneys office last week asked the judge in the case to restrict Mr. Trumps access to some case material. The office requested that the former president be barred from reviewing the material without his lawyers present, and more broadly from publicizing the prosecutions evidence on social media or through other channels.

In a court filing, Mr. Trumps lawyers called the prosecutors request extreme. They argued that any restrictions placed on Mr. Trump should apply to prosecutors as well, and said that barring the former president from discussing evidence would violate his First Amendment rights.

President Trump is the leading Republican candidate for president of the United States, the filing said. To state the obvious, there will continue to be significant public commentary about this case and his candidacy, to which he has a right and a need to respond, both for his own sake and for the benefit of the voting public.

Mr. Trump has been charged with 34 felonies by the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, who accused the former president of trying to cover up a potential sex scandal during the 2016 presidential campaign. At a news conference after Mr. Trump was arraigned last month, Mr. Bragg argued that Mr. Trump repeatedly made false statements to conceal a $130,000 hush-money payment made on his behalf to a porn star, Stormy Daniels.

Mr. Trumps lawyers, Todd Blanche, Susan R. Necheles and Joseph Tacopina, said in the court filing that Mr. Bragg made statements at the news conference that would have violated the restrictions he sought had it applied to him. They said that before Mr. Bragg took the podium, they had been nearing an agreement with prosecutors on the terms of an order that would have limited the former presidents access to evidence.

Prosecutors apparently believe that New York law allows the district attorneys office and its witnesses to freely speak and quote from grand jury evidence, but not President Trump or his counsel, the filing said, taking aim at Ms. Daniels, as well as the former fixer who paid her, Michael D. Cohen.

A spokeswoman for the district attorneys office declined to comment.

Mr. Trumps lawyers said that they also took issue with the protective order the document in which prosecutors specified their proposed restrictions on access to case material to the extent that it prevented Mr. Trump from discussing the prosecutions evidence. And they disputed prosecutors argument that Mr. Trump has a history of attacking law enforcement officials who have investigated him.

This history, according to the People, justifies an extremely restrictive protective order that, if entered, would severely hamper President Trumps ability to publicly defend himself and prepare for trial, they wrote.

Ben Protess contributed reporting.

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Trump's Lawyers Fight Bragg's Effort to Limit Access to Evidence - The New York Times

In advance of Mr. Trumps New York indictment, his former adviser Roger Stone reminded people to keep their protests civil and legal. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said she would be pointing at people to be arrested if theyre being violent. Many (but not all) of the Trump-backed candidates who lost in November conceded their elections within a normal time frame. This was good for the country, but also a bit of a puzzle: Many of these people claimed a major election was stolen, so why wouldnt they do the same for their own? The drag and scrutiny in the aftermath of Jan. 6 might be an answer.

Deterrence is an uneasy goal, however hard to measure, impossible to predict, and at danger of becoming retribution in the wrong hands, or even hardening reactionary and illiberal elements by accident.

Deterrence would also suggest an established kind of consensus: that a specific crime was, in fact, committed and the goal moving forward is to keep other crimes like it from being perpetrated. With many entry points to the problem, and without a shared consensus about what the real problem with the Trump era was, satisfaction here might be difficult to achieve. Theres also a kind of dark-night-of-the-soul, The Godfather Part II concern, which surfaced in early polling after the New York indictment, that at least some segment of the country most likely finds that prosecution to be political, and doesnt seem to mind. And Mr. Trump is raising a lot of money and consolidating his polling advantage in the wake of the first indictment.

Consensus and order are unusual, though. Ms. Lofgren noted that the Jan. 6 committee was different from any experience shed had, beginning with its unique presentation structure. You had to have a unified view of what was the mission, and the mission was to find all the facts that we could, and then tell them, she said. There wasnt a political divide on that. But that doesnt mean we saw everything exactly the same way, exactly at the same time. The committee, she explained, used closed-door discussions to reach public unity: There were times when I thought one thing and by the time wed spent a couple of hours thinking through it, I became convinced of someone elses point of view. And the same thing happened with other members. Thats also rare.

Reaching one shared idea of what happened and why things went wrong, even within a smaller group behind closed doors, has real appeal, even if its not how we would want a country run. Instead, its like the best society can do is to keep applying a kind of societal weight to Mr. Trump attention on the accurate memory of the events, the creation of legal hurdles and public scrutiny, possibly doomed prosecutions of varying quality adding a little more weight, a little more weight, a little more weight in an effort to contain him. Its like some mixed-up version of deterrence and truth, with a society trying something, anything, with possibly volatile precedents for the future.

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Opinion | Donald Trump May Have Begun Losing - The New York Times

US elections 2024

Mainstream Christian leaders criticize Pastors for Trump for distorting religious teachings and endangering democracy

A far-right religious group with ties to Donald Trump loyalists Roger Stone and retired Army Lt Gen Michael Flynn is planning events with pastors in swing-state churches in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere to spur more evangelical backing for the former US presidents 2024 campaign.

But the group, Pastors for Trump, is drawing sharp rebukes from mainstream Christian leaders for being extremist, distorting Christian teachings and endangering American democracy by fueling the spread of Christian nationalism.

The Oklahoma-based evangelical pastor and businessman Jackson Lahmeyer leads the fledgling Pastors for Trump organization. Lahmeyer told the Guardian it boasts over 7,000 pastors as members and that he will unveil details about its plans on 11 May at the Trump National Doral in Miami, an event Trump will be invited to attend.

Stone, a self-styled dirty trickster whom Trump pardoned after he was convicted of lying to Congress, is slated to join Lahmeyer in speaking on 11 May, according to the pastor. Lahmeyer added he will talk more about his pro Trump group at a ReAwaken America evangelical gathering on 12 and 13 May at the Doral.

Lahmeyer said the pastors group intends to sponsor a freedom tour with evening church meetings in key swing states this summer, an effort that could help Trump win more backing from this key Republican voting bloc, which could prove crucial to his winning the GOP nomination again.

Lahmeyer described the genesis of Pastors for Trump in dark and apocalyptic rhetoric that has echoes of Trumps own bombast.

Were going down a very evil path in this country, he said. Our economy is being destroyed. Its China, the deep state and globalists.

China interfered in our 2020 elections, he added. This is biblical, whats happening. This is a spiritual battle.

But those ominous beliefs have drawn sharp criticism.

This kind of overt embrace of white Christian nationalism continues to pose a growing threat to the witness of the church and the health of our democracy, said Adam Russell Taylor, the president of the Christian social justice group Sojourners.

This pastor and this effort are trying to impose a Christian theocracy. Its imperative that Christian leaders of all backgrounds, including conservative ones, speak out about this effort as a threat to our democracy and to the church.

Other religious leaders warn of the dangers that Pastors for Trump poses by marrying Christian nationalism with political vitriol and election lies.

For years, Trump has tried to co-opt religious leaders to serve his campaign, even attempting to change long-standing tax law to allow dark money to flow through houses of worship, said Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

Tragically, far too many pastors have confused political power with religious authority, and have thrown their lot in with Trump, no matter the cost to their ministry. Pastors for Trump is the next step in this unholy alliance, mixing Christian nationalism, election lies and vitriolic language in a gross distortion of Christianity.

There is ample evidence Lahmeyer has embraced religious and political views replete with extremist positions.

Lahmeyer has previously attacked former House speaker Nancy Pelosi as a demon, and former Covid adviser Anthony Fauci a mass-murdering Luciferian. To Lahmeyer, the attack on the Capitol on January 6 by a mob of pro-Trump supporters was an FBI inside job.

Besides his apocalyptic rhetoric, Lahmeyers effort has echoes of the two-year-old ReAwaken America tour, which has combined election denialism with Christian nationalism and regularly featured Flynn at its two-day revival-style meetings.

In 2021, Flynn provided strong and early backing for Lahmeyer in an abortive primary campaign by the pastor to gain the Republican nomination for a Senate seat from Oklahoma.

Flynn, who worked to overturn Trumps loss to Joe Biden by pushing bogus claims of election fraud, and who Trump pardoned after he pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI about contacts he had with Russians before briefly serving as Trumps national security adviser, is a real hero in Lahmeyers eyes.

Flynn is a leader and general, Lahmeyer told the Guardian. I trust him, and I have come to love him. Hes been like a father to me.

Those bonds were reinforced in early 2021 when Lahmeyer introduced Flynn to Clay Clark, an Oklahoma entrepreneur and a member of his church, who teamed up with Flynn to host20 ReAwaken revival-like gatherings over the last two years nationwide, all of which Lahmeyer said hes attended.

Late last year, Lahmeyer unveiled Pastors for Trump on Stones eponymous Stone Zone podcast, a relationship that was forged in 2021 when Stone served as a key paid consultant to Lahmeyers primary campaign.

Pastors for Trump is interwoven with the Trump campaign, but were a separate grassroots group, Lahmeyer said, indicating it is a 501(c)(4) non-profit social welfare, which is awaiting IRS tax status approval.

To date, the pastors group has created a two person board that includes South Carolina pastor Mark Burns, a key Trump campaign religious adviser who backed Trumps 2016 run and who told the Guardian he is a spiritual adviser to Trump.

Lahmeyer said his group hopes to arrange an event in Las Vegas in August to coincide with a ReAwaken America gathering that is scheduled there, and that he expects to start fundraising to increase his groups membership and activism.

Asked if Stone and Flynn may participate in the various swing state church gatherings, Lahmeyer said: Id be dumb not to ask them. Stone and General Flynn are huge supporters.

To push the groups pro-Trump messages, Lahmeyer has arranged prayer calls in recent months that have included Stone, Flynn and ex-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, all of whom promoted bogus claims of election fraud in 2020 and tried to help Trump overturn his loss to Joe Biden.

One call that included a segment with Trump in late March, which Lahmeyer hosted and that Stone and Flynn participated in, went badly awry when the sound quality was interrupted for several minutes with Trump on the line.

Lahmeyer told the Stone Zone the next day that trolls had infiltrated the back stage of the platform they were using, while Trump fingered the radical left for hacking his phone when he tried to join the call.

The launch of Pastors for Trump came not long after a rise in public criticism of Trump from some evangelical leaders that suggested waning support among evangelicals.

Dr Everett Piper, the ex-president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, a Christian university, in November wrote an op-ed entitled Its time for the GOP to say it: Donald Trump is hurting us, not helping us. Piper wrote that in the 2022 midterms Trump hindered rather than helped the much-anticipated red wave.

Likewise, Bob Vander Plaats, the Iowa-based president and chief executive of the Family Leader, a conservative social group, has tweeted about Trump: Its time to turn the page. America must move on. Walk off the stage with class.

Little wonder that in January Trump condemned evangelical leaders who publicly criticized his new campaign for their disloyalty.

Some scholars and recent polls, however, suggest Trump still has significant support in the evangelical circles, and that he should garner hefty support again from evangelical voters in the primaries if he is to be the nominee.

Trumps enduring appeal to evangelicals is the greatest single triumph of identity politics in modern American history, David Hollinger, an emeritus history professor at Berkeley and the author of Christianitys American Fate, told the Guardian.

The evangelicals who flocked to Trump have good reason to stay with him.

Still, Tyler of the Baptist Joint Committee is alarmed at the Pastors for Trump campaign.

Most clergy avoid endorsing political candidates, even in their personal capacity, because they know the polarizing impact it would have on their congregations and the distractions it would cause from their calling and the mission of the church.

Similarly, Taylor of Sojourners says Pastors for Trump is particularly worrisome. This is further evidence that the threat of muscular white Christian nationalism is real and needs to be counteracted.

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Pro-Trump pastors rebuked for overt embrace of white Christian nationalism - The Guardian US

Donald Trump and CNN have in recent years seemed to go together as well as Coca-Cola and mayonnaise, which is to say not at all. Now the two entities are teaming up for a town-hall program to be broadcast next week.

Kaitlan Collins, the former Washington correspondent turned morning anchor who was often called out by Trump during rallies and press scrums, will moderate a live CNN Town Hall with the former president on May 10 from St. Anselm College in New Hampshire. Trump, who has declared his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, will take questions from an audience of New Hampshire Republicans and undeclared voters who say they intend to vote in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary.

CNN has in the recent past seemed to take a dim view of Trump, and vice-versa. Trump routinely called CNN journalism fake news, and yelled at CNN reporters during White House press conferences (he yelled at correspondents from other journalism outlets as well). CNN famously sued the Trump White House in 2018 after Jim Acostas credentials were revoked following a contentious press conference (Fox News Channel, incidentally, supported CNN in the argument).

The interview is revealed as CNN, now under the ownership of Warner Bros. Discovery, seeks to broaden its appeal to viewers who may be liberal or conservative. The network has taken care to point out a new spate of bookings involving Republican newsmakers in recent months, and on Monday, aired a segment on CNN This Morning that examined Mike Lindell, the entrepreneur behind MyPillow, and his quest to push theories that Republicans who lost their bid for election to national office in the 2022 midterm elections, actually won. Lindells theories have been debunked several times.

CNN said it has a longstanding tradition of hosting leading presidential candidates for Town Halls and political events as a critical component of the networks robust campaign coverage, and that this town hall will be the first of many for CNN in thecoming months as CNN correspondents travel across the country to hear directly from voters in the runup to the 2024 presidential election.

CNNs zeal to cover Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election has been seen as a critical factor in his Oval Office victory.

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Donald Trump to Appear on CNN Town Hall in Seeming Rapprochement - Variety