16 places that shaped the 2016 election: Turnberry golf resort, Ayr, Scotland

By Nov. 9, the votes will have been cast and counted, there will be a winner and a loser, and the country will begin a slow return to normal. Historians will have their say on the outcome, but all of us who have lived through this election will carry away indelible memories of a shocking year in American history: of a handful of ordinary people, swept up in the rush of history; of a series of moments on which the fate of the nation seemed, at least briefly, to turn; and of places on the map that became symbols of a divided nation. As we count down to Election Day, Yahoo News has identified 16 unforgettable people, moments and places.

As Donald Trump has often remarked during his presidential campaign, even if he loses, he’ll still be rich. So in late June, with the Republican nomination locked up, he took a couple of days off from politics to tend to business. Specifically, he invited the press to join him for the opening of his new Trump Turnberry golf resort in Ayr, Scotland. This is an event that under ordinary circumstances would have attracted coverage from publications ranging from Golf Week to Golf Digest to Golf. But a month before the Republican convention that would nominate Trump for president, it brought golf-cart-loads of journalists from all over the world, to photograph him against the backdrop of the Firth of Clyde and the intensely picturesque 1878 Turnberry Lighthouse, renovated into a two-bedroom “presidential suite” that rents for 3,500 pounds sterling (now about $4,500) a night.

By coincidence, Trump landed the day after Britain had shocked the world by voting to leave the European Union. Trump had prepared for the inevitable questions in his usual fashion, by choosing to wing it. “I’ve been in touch with them,” he said vaguely, referring to his foreign-policy advisers, “but there’s nothing to talk about.” Also characteristically, he saw the event as a vindication of his own candidacy. “There are great similarities between what happened here and my own campaign,” Trump said, perhaps unaware that Scotland had actually voted against the “Brexit.” “People want to take their country back. … They want to take their borders back.”

And, he added, it would be good for business, at least this part of his business, if it meant that the British pound declined in value, noting: “When the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry, frankly.” He dwelt with greater enthusiasm on the “absolute highest standards” of construction at his newest establishment and its “incredible” luxury suites — holding the resort up as a “mini-example” of what he would do for the United States if elected.

He would return to this theme, months later, when, with the promise of a press conference renouncing his long-held conviction that President Obama was born abroad, he lured the media to an extended live pitch for his Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Win or lose, he said, he’d be on Pennsylvania Avenue come 2017. — By Jerry Adler

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