We can’t fight Donald Trump with outrage alone - Kevan Christie

Oh, how it could have all been so different.

President Donald Trump talks with reporters before departing on Marine One on Thursday, May 30. Picture: AP

If only Donald Trump was a good guy, instead of a racist, misogynist, golf cheat, well worth-the-watching as he tees up from the rough during the weekly seniors medal at your local club.

For the Prez could have been dining on fresh salmon, haggis, neeps and tatties then Cranachan pudding with an Irn Bru chaser at Bute House before receiving his limited edition audiobook version of Sunset Song from oor Nicola - if he wasn’t such a trumpet.

But he’s never been and never will be invited to the Sturgeon hoose for tea and he won’t be getting the keys to Edinburgh Castle anytime soon. No official visit to Scotchland for him.

‘Sine die, do one Trumpet you’re no welcome here’ say the Scottish Government, him being half-Scottish tae and on an equal footing with the likes of Sir Rod Stewart and ex-footballer Richard Gough in the tartan gies a game stakes.

A crying shame - we could have shown him the Giant Pandas we got from China - that’s how we do trade deals here pal. Got any rubbish animals?

They don’t even have to be real - two folk dressed up in panda suits will do just throw them some bamboo and a KitKat biscuit.

Great fun taking the mickey out of the Trumpet, a veritable national sport and how we laughed at the sweary placards and giant baby blimp.

But, no matter how gratifying it may be to attack this easiest of targets and his demented entourage - it’s getting a wee bit boring.

We’re like toddlers pointing at the ‘bad man’.

This focus on Trump’s personality unfortunately brings us no closer to understanding the factors that swept him to power and how they are reflected in the UK’s Brexit debacle.

Right-wing and nationalist parties gained a sizeable number of seats in the European Parliament, with a new right-wing alliance to be formed.

It’s way too easy to dismiss national-populist movements as a place for angry, white older men as their supporters are more diverse than that but are all too often easily dismissed as ‘thick’.

Quick maths - 63 million Americans probably not all racists, at least in their own minds, voted for the Trumpet in the 2016 US election.

Of this 53 per cent of white women eschewed equal rights to vote for the guy who likes to grab em’ by the p**** instead of coming out to support Hillary Clinton...the white woman candidate.

White non-college voters comprised around two-thirds of Trump’s base in the primaries and around three-fifths in his election battle with Clinton, so there is an educational divide in play but we don’t hear the voices of these people. They’re not part of the Twitterati.

Can you vote for a racist and claim not to be a racist or vote for a misogynist and claim to support equal rights? No on both counts, some things can’t be squared away.

However, there’s no doubt Trump could win again in 2020 making him a two-term president while the Democrats still ruminate over the first catastrophic loss and sleep-walk to another shocking defeat.

Rather than exam in detail why this so-called freak election result occurred and the real reasons behind it, opponents of Trump and his Brexit buddy Farage prefer the insult and the nuclear milkshake option.

This makes us happy and safe in the knowledge that we’re collectively on the right side of history.

But recent political losers and I include the IndyRef 2014 movement in this are useless at facing up to the real reasons for their defeat.

There’s a rush to agree a losers charter - the Vow, £350 million a week to spend on the NHS, Russian collusion, a chosen narrative emerges that doesn’t take into account their own failings.

In the case of Trump, we use humour as a shield - his supporters are right-wing nutters, they told massive porkies, what about those MAGA hats - quick get them in the pigeon-hole sharpish.

However, while we’re all busy patting each other on the back in applauding our own wit, that lot, the right-wing populists are winning elections and look like they’re going to keep putting W’s on the board.

A strong economy in the run up to the US 2020 election, no troops in war zones and nothing sticking to the teflon Donald in terms of the Mueller investigations and we’re looking at another four years of chaos.

They’ve changed the rules of engagement and the mainstream media (MSM) are playing catch up.

Take Trump’s tweet as he arrived in the UK this week calling London Mayor Sadiq Khan a ‘stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London’.

Childish insults? Yes, and the ‘sort of behaviour you would expect from an 11-year-old’ as Khan rightly pointed out. Correct again - but no surprise there.

We need to get past this sense of outrage at everything Trump says or does.

Trump and Farage are not speaking to us - they’re playing to their own audience.

What the insulting tweet does is make you think for a split second about the association between Khan and crime in London - namely knife crime.

Now, that’s completely unfair - Tory cuts to police funding are a huge factor and leaked Home Office research underscored this but the damage has been done. Pressure point found - Trump delivers the bullet in Tweet form but who’s pulling the strings?

The recent car-crash interview between Andrew Marr and Farage highlighted how off the pace the broadcast media have become.

To many Marr skewered Farage with his blasts from the past on global warming but Farage won the encounter easily. He attacked the BBC and spoke to his audience cementing his position ahead of the EU elections.

The BBC lost as soon as they invited him on. Farage like Trump will ignore the questions - it’s almost pointless unless you have aggressive interviewers like James O’Brien who can take the fight to them.

So, it seems like a distant memory when Trump was best pals with Alex and we were handing him university degrees.

Mary Anne Macleod - your boy let us down.