Our rivals are a Trumpian construct beyond any ability to change.

This article is available in audio form below.

Yesterday was one of the slowest days on this site in weeks, all because we didn’t post an early morning article at 8:00 AM to set the momentum for the rest of the day. And why didn’t we post at that time? Because I was still in bed, having stayed up all night to watch the Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump debate. It was, quite possibly, the most extraordinary two hours I’ve witnessed in a long time.

I’ve been watching American political debates since my teens, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I’m not just saying what I wish I believed. After the Biden-Trump debate, I wrote extensively here and elsewhere that it was the worst performance I’d ever seen from a major presidential candidate, and I lean towards Biden. So, when I say Trump’s performance in this debate was even worse, you can take it to the bank.

Beyond the lies we’ve grown accustomed to, the overblown hyperbole and grandiosity—clearly evidence of a deep-seated psychological issue—came statements so bizarre that to call them odd would be an understatement. They were off-the-chart nuts.

Among other things, he claimed that Kamala Harris is a Marxist, that Joe Biden hates her, that no one died on January 6th, and he blamed Nancy Pelosi for the events of that day. He continues to deny that he lost the 2020 election. All of that seemed almost normal next to his claim that in certain American states, they kill newborn babies as a form of abortion, and that in other states, immigrants are eating dogs and cats.

It was supremely, spectacularly unhinged stuff.

That debate subjected all of America to international mortification, but only half of America deserves to be viewed through that lens. Half of America continues to function normally, grounded in reality. It is the Republican Party that should feel deeply, deeply ashamed for allowing this unhinged maniac—this ranting, raving clown car driver—to be their nominee, with all the dangers he represents to America and the world.

There’s a small cadre of Trump sympathizers who often message this site, trying to get their comments posted. Knock yourselves out, guys. Reflect on what the world watched last night, and if you choose, subject yourselves to the humiliation of revealing that you too live down a rabbit hole, swallowing baseless lies and conspiracy theories, cheering on an obvious lunatic. It speaks volumes about your character, and what it says is not flattering. It speaks to your intellect, and that’s more damning than anything I could ever say.

These are not normal people, any more than Trump is a normal candidate.

And it’s funny, because I’ve spent the last two weeks writing about people like this in the context of the club across the city. I’ve been writing about fans who have spent a decade or more in the same retreat from reality, fact, logic, and sense.

They believe their club survived liquidation, even though the documents proving otherwise are there for all to see. They think they were the victims of a massive, all-encompassing global conspiracy involving the Labour Party, the Scottish National Party, members of the Tory Party, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the judiciary, the national press, and the heads of almost all of Scotland’s senior football clubs. They think this conspiracy was orchestrated at Celtic Park by our board members.

They believe referees are biased against them, that the SFA itself is biased against them, despite years with the organization led by someone who concealed evidence on their behalf of the very offences for which they were liquidated. The governing body even tried to put their Newco straight into the top flight, organized the predetermined Lord Nimmo Smith inquiry, and was headed by a chief executive who believed the same conspiracy theory and wrote about it in a book.

They think Dundee’s vote to end the season in the year COVID struck was part of another conspiracy and that Dundee was somehow rewarded for voting in “our” favour. They attempted to bring down the executive leadership of the governing body based on that belief, even producing a dossier more dubious than the one Labour presented to justify the Iraq war. Our own chief executive dismissed it as fantasy and rubbish after one look.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Their paranoia and embrace of lies—even those easily disproven—are embodied in two falsehoods that underpin their current institution: the survival lie and the victim lie.

Perhaps the greatest lie they tell themselves is that they are the biggest club in the country and that success and glory are theirs by right. They think these are being denied not because Celtic is simply a better-run club with a better manager, players, and more resources, but because we’ve somehow rigged the game against them.

None of this nonsense helps them. None of it makes them a better football club. In fact, it is precisely these comforting fictions that prevent them from doing the things that might actually help.

Had Trump accepted his 2020 defeat instead of disappearing down his own rabbit hole of paranoia, many of his current problems wouldn’t exist. Let’s be perfectly honest: this is a man whose entire life has been driven by grievance. Many considered him a fool from the day he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his intention to run for president.

Trump was a joke. His candidacy was a joke. The belief that he could win or that he deserved to win was like something out of a Marx Brothers film or a crazy, reality-bending Simpsons episode. It wasn’t something to be taken seriously. No one believed they would ever see it happen.

He could have walked away at the end of his term because he was no longer seen as a joke or a fool. He may have come across as deranged and idiotic, but he could have spent the rest of his life comfortably, as a major player in American politics, and a giant in the garish, demented remnants of what was once the Grand Old Party.

The great and the good, if we’re calling them that, of the GOP would have made endless pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago. He could have launched “Trump Media,” running everything from right-wing TV channels to radio shows, even getting into print media if that was what he wanted. The plans were laid; all he had to do was accept the election result and walk away.

In his madness, his ego, and his total inability to accept defeat, he sowed the seeds of his present troubles. The attempted coup on January 6th made him a clear and present danger to U.S. national security. His spiteful attempt to hang onto classified documents, refusing to hand them back, puts him at risk of criminal prosecution that could see him serving decades-long sentences. Facing those troubles, which he brought upon himself, he re-entered the arena with the explicit intention of putting himself beyond the reach of the law by occupying the highest office in the land once more.

Imagine what the club across the city might have become had it learned the lessons of 2012 and accepted what happened to Rangers. I wrote last week about how the years since represent a squandered opportunity that was in their hands. But it’s deeper than that, of course. If they had accepted the reality of the situation—that they were a club born from the ashes of one that spent its way to the grave—they could have taken their fans with them by embracing a different approach.

Some fans, unable to accept the reality of that position, might have walked away. But the core would have stayed, and the entire mentality of that club might be very different today.

Imagine fans over there who accepted the self-inflicted nature of what happened before the administration and liquidation of Rangers. Those fans would have understood the need for the Newco to operate within narrow financial parameters. They would have been free of the supremacist mindset that views winning as an entitlement. Their patience for a long-term project, which rewarded faith and slow, steady progress, would, in the end, have made them formidable opponents.

Instead, from the very first day of their very first game, they chose to embrace denial, deflection, and hate, and the fiction that all their problems were caused by others.

Just as Trump embraced his lie, they embraced theirs. Everything that has happened to them since was inevitable from that dark moment. It is too late to make them into something different, just as it is too late now to change who Donald J Trump is.

No matter what his handlers told him to do, prior to that debate, his base nature, overrode even his own best interests. On the date that he crushed Biden he was riding high. On the day he survived the assassination attempt, I had a chat with my two best friends, two guys I’ve known for years who I met through political activism, Jonny Garner and Matthew Marr, and we all agreed that all Trump had to do was act normal for a few months and to talk about uniting people rather than dividing them, and he almost certainly would have been elected in November regardless of what the Democrats decided to do with their own ailing candidate.

But Donald Trump is Donald Trump.

When Kamala Harris goaded him about the size of the crowds at his rallies, he spent two of the three minutes he had to speak on his supposed strengths rambling about that instead. He then used the remaining minute to rave like a lunatic about people eating other people’s pets. If she wins this election, that’s the clip they’ll play over and over again.

And, for the first time at Ibrox, there is a board of directors who have seen the writing on the wall and know that re-engaging with reality is long overdue and the only way the club can function moving forward. The reckoning has finally come—the reckoning with the need to spend only what they have coming through the doors. The result of that has been savage cost-cutting, reducing their squad to the level of a third-place challenger.

If they accept this has to be done, they might reshape their football operation into something that actually works, something that makes sense. In four or five years, they might give us something to think about.

But Sevco is Sevco and Sevco thinks it’s Rangers.

What’s more, they still believe Rangers was real and not itself an artificial construct built on debt, made to seem more than it was. So, they can no more accept their position than Trump can accept he lost in 2020. They can no more tolerate being second—far less third—than he could keep calm in the face of Harris’s trolling on the debate stage.

When the manager asks for time, we laugh because we know they won’t give him that. When their board asks for patience, we slap our thighs and throw back our heads because we know it’s a non-starter. When they talk about living within their means, we have no reason to fear they might actually do it. Their rabid support base, which has embraced all these lies and the supremacist garbage, believes their new club was founded on the basis that it was the old one, with all the baggage that brings. They are incapable of change.

What makes them act this way? What makes them behave like this? Why do they believe it’s better to live in these fantasies than accept the truth, even when the truth gives them their best chance of ever seeing a successful football club at Ibrox?

It’s a question that fascinates me. But if I’m honest, I don’t really care what the answer is any more than I care about what makes Trump the malignant narcissist he is.

I couldn’t give a damn if his father was a bastard or what mental torture he endured as a child. Whatever sympathy I have on a human level was long since erased by the loathsome nature of the person he became. I think it is critical for the betterment of his country—and for the security and safety of every citizen of this planet—that he does not get elected again.

I don’t care what motivates the Ibrox fan base to behave the way they do.

I know that tens of thousands of them sing about being up to their knees in my blood, and the blood of my friends and family members, and that’s really all I need to know. I don’t care where that sentiment comes from. And so, I don’t care why they believe what they do, but I recognise that those beliefs cause them more damage than they do to the rest of us.

That’s been demonstrated over and over again.

At the same time, I freely recognise that some of their ideas are every bit as dangerous as the deranged nonsense Trump believes. There must be checks and balances to ensure their club doesn’t behave recklessly and endanger itself and the rest of the Scottish game.

But I will never get tired of seeing these people crushed, embarrassed, and beaten, and as amazing as Trump’s debate performance was, the last eleven days or so have been every bit as extraordinary at the club across the city and every bit as deranged.

I think Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will be the next President and Vice President of the United States. It will be November before we find out for sure, and if they win, they will not take office until January next year.

By that time, I expect there will be a new incumbent in the main office at Ibrox.

And whoever that is, by the time Harris and Walz formally take their oaths of office, Brendan Rodgers will have already gone there in the league and beaten the guy, and the cycle of destruction at that club will have already started anew.

Because they are Sevco, and Sevco cannot change.