THE Scottish Greens have issued a warning ahead of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration today.
The president-elect will take the oath of office from inside the Capitol Rotunda in Washington DC on Monday around 1:15pm GMT.
It comes after forecasts of very cold weather forced the inauguration inside for the first time since Ronald Reagan in 1985.
Now, Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman has told The National that Trump is a “real and present danger to people and planet” and sounded the alarm as the world braces for the official start to his second term.
“The politics that he represents are the exact opposite of everything that Scotland should stand for,” she said.
““We know who will pay the greatest price for his tenure. It will be migrant communities who he will further marginalise, punish and scapegoat. It will be LGBTQIA+ people who he will smear and demonise, and it will be women who want to access reproductive rights.”
The Green MSP (above) added: “With wildfires raging in LA, the case for international climate action is greater than ever. We cannot afford to reach the end of his second presidential term with our environment even more decimated and our global economy even more dependent on fossil fuels.
“Scotland must stand up to Trump and resist the politics of climate denial and hate. We must hold him to account both as a businessman here in Scotland for the questionable deals and the damage he is doing in Aberdeenshire and beyond, and as a US president for the far-right ideology and harm he represents.”
On Sunday, Scottish Greens co-leader Lorna Slater also expressed alarm ahead of Trump’s swearing in and hit out a First Minister John Swinney’s contact with the incoming president, saying that if Trump decides to put "punitive tariffs" on countries and products "there is a question about how far the world will go".
She told BBC Scotland's The Sunday Show: “Developing Scottish businesses is of course something we want to do and it such a shame that Brexit has damaged that.
"Cow-towing to Donald Trump and allowing him to dictate how the rest of the world goes, is not a future that is going to be one where people can thrive because once you give him an inch. He’ll take a mile. If it’s not Salmon and Whisky, what else will it be.
“What kind of horrors are in our future if we let Donald Trump build that future?”
