Yesterday afternoon, a truly extraordinary thing happened; a sitting US President actually went on TV to claim victory in an election he hadn’t actually won and to demand that those still counting the votes stop doing so, lest those votes remove him from office.
The world was shocked. I was shocked.
But only at those who expressed their surprise.
Nothing about it was remotely surprising.
This is what Trump is; a bigoted narcissist without the least concern for norms or traditions or accepted standards.
Anyone who thought he would maintain a dignified silence – or, really, any silence at all – hasn’t been paying attention.
For some of us, his bitching and wailing and throwing about of legal threats (and extra-legal ones) raised a smile for other reasons.
There was a familiarity to this blubbering, the whining of someone who’s losing and knows it, who’s seen which way the wind is blowing and who doesn’t like it one little bit.
It is worth recalling those stories the media likes to occasionally raise about how this bigot with an orange hue once “looked at” buying the Ibrox club … and how gleeful some were when his hotel group entered into a modest commercial partnership with them last year.
The truth is, I couldn’t imagine a better owner for them than this appalling man, who will spend his post-election life fighting to stay out of prison, accused of dodging his taxes amidst reams of other corruptions. A man who sends out savage, often incoherent, social media statements. A conspiracy theorist. A fantasist. A racist. A sectarian. A debt-dumper. Someone who’s finances and sources of funding are opaque and require investigating.
I could go on, but you get the picture. The parallels are obvious.
But Trump is also a loser and a bad loser at that. Hard to believe, right?
Some would argue to the nines that this guy is, in fact, the ultimate winner.
Yet I would argue the opposite. A loner, incapable of a single human connection, forever looking over his shoulder, petty, small-minded, paranoid. He seems to have vast wealth, but actually lives under mammoth debts. He has a beautiful wife, but she won’t sleep in the same room as him.
Aside from being lucky if he manages to die wearing something other than a prison jumpsuit, he has had and squandered the ultimate political office; history will recall Donald Trump with nothing but contempt and scorn, as almost certainly the worst individual ever to hold that office, and certainly the most unfit.
The current Ibrox club is the same.
For openers, they have a belief that history will remember them as something special, but that assumes that the current perspective will survive those desperados who have pushed the Survival Lie on us. But it won’t. The lie is too egregious, too obvious, impossible to support, and most of us simply will not let it stand.
The previous Ibrox club’s nine in a row is hailed as a momentous triumph, but in fact it laid the ground for the eventual liquidation of the club, and in many ways it set up our own current nine and teed up this season, where we’ll clinch the tenth.
So what their nine worth? Success at the time, but the ultimate result was total disaster.
Trump reminded me yesterday of their unhinged behaviour at the end of last season, where their board embraced conspiracy theories and demanded investigations and sackings. The numbers were never there to let them claim a phony victory but they were very happy trying to de-legitimise ours, and not only did they try to whip the mob up but there were elements of the media who didn’t just nod and wink in their direction but jumped right in to help.
They made accusations without a shred of evidence.
They released statements of such mind-bending paranoia and lunacy that some of us in the blogosphere stopped even trying to pretend it was worth debating them, and resorted to outright mockery instead.
I wrote a piece comparing them to lunatics having a “board meeting” inside the asylum.
Nothing about their approach made a shred of sense.
They repulsed neutrals, they talked up their case although they clearly didn’t have one and thus opened themselves up to ridicule, and they knew all along that they would never over-turn the result they were protesting against. There are people all over the game who will not forget what they did.
Again, the parallels between the pathetic squealing we heard from them last year and Trump and his campaign trying to go to court over every lost vote is obvious.
And all of this is all the more delicious when you consider his opponent and, God willing, the next President of the United States.
Joe Biden is a friend of the Irish; a man whose Secret Service codename is Celtic.
Did you see his speech last night
? It was everything Trump’s wasn’t; statesmanlike and decent, compassionate and unifying.
So we have an upright Celtic minded man on the brink of snatching power from an orange tinted bigot with a shady financial history, a rash of allegations against him, prone to ranting and raving like a loony and with a paranoia quotient off the scale.
The Celtic minded man is rational and reasonable and has a real respect for other people and the integrity of institutions and tradition. The orange hatemonger stokes fear and resentment, for his own purposes, and will not accept defeat even when it is entirely within the rules, and who, at the same time, has a total contempt for those same regulations.
Hopefully, if the results keep going as they are, America’s long nightmare will be over soon.
Ours has a way to go, but on a day when we’re reminded both what we’re up against and how unstable these Peepul are I feel more than sure we’ll get over the line.
Join us on Facebook by Liking and Following our page … don’t miss another article.