Think of Scotland and you can come up with a plentiful list of famous people. Robert the Bruce, Alexander Fleming, John Logie Baird, Adam Smith and Robert Burns come to mind, whilst in sport there is Alex Ferguson, Kenny Dalglish, Liz McColgan, Alun Wells and of course, more recently, the Murray brothers, who not only became the first ever Scotsmen to pick up tennis rackets, they actually became winners in several Open championships.

However, no matter how much I trawl through these ‘Top 100 Scotsmen’ lists, I can’t find Donald Trump, the son of Anne McCleod from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Who would of thought that a little Presbyterian Isle built on tweed and fishing would produce a bastard of such proportions?

But that it did, with Donald’s mother leaving Lewis as an 18 year-old, going for a holiday in New York (that must have been quite a shock) and never returning after meeting Fred Trump and going on to marry him in 1936. Donald was born in 1946 as the son of a Scotswoman with German immigrants as Grandparents. Bloody immigrants, lock the borders I say, or at least Donald does.

What followed was a career amassing billions through corrupt land leasing, corporate fraud and a plethora of voluntary bankruptcies, as well as more lawsuits than the total amount of hot dinners consumed in the lives of everyone reading this post. To be rich and successful in the United States, it really does help if you are a total robbing bastard of biblical proportions; that’s why there is no money left for anyone else.

It also grants you enough power to run for President, the ultimate achievement for people like Trump who think they own the people by right of wealth, galvanising support with right-wing propaganda that is consumed by mad right-wing evangelists of which the United States have aplenty, particularly across its southern belt.

Trump: Pantomime Bastard

However, the main issue must be whether is Trump is actually dangerous and is indeed a genuine potential Presidential candidate. Is he a 21st Century Adolf Hitler or just another passing pantomime villain given a platform to amuse and distract us from the depressing affairs regarding Middle Eastern wars, terrorism, and climate change?

The answer is no, he is not a potential President. He is in the race of course and if you are in the race, you can win it, but from what I am reading, he only has a 25% chance of actually becoming the Republican candidate, let alone the President. If, in the highly unlikely event that he wins the republican candidacy, thousands of Republicans won’t bother to vote in protest and there will be a surge in votes from Democrats who want to ensure he stays out of the White House.

He is a bit like a rich Nick Griffin (the former BNP leader) riding high on a populist anti-immigration wave being pushed along by paranoid right-wing evangelists who froth at the mouth whilst watching Fox News and feel sufficiently important enough to arm themselves with an arsenal of weapons just in case the Pizza delivery man turns out to be a Muslim immigrant. All of us in Britain generalise and think all Americans think this way and love Donald Trump but the truth is that huge swathes of them find him a source of embarrassment.

All these Trump types who try to emulate the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and even Moseley, always fail because they lack any depth with any other policy apart from populist ant-immigration and are, in reality, just pantomime villains compared to their fascist predecessors in 1930’s Europe who were far higher in intellect and charisma. They also benefitted from being fearsome orators and experts in the art of creating internal fear of attack or fiscal theft by other countries or their religion, particular during financial meltdown.

So, I will now place my bet and say that Trump’s campaign will be largely forgotten by this time next year.

So why is everyone so bothered by it? Well, personally, I think it all comes to down to a narcissistic desire to appear to be a good human, a bastion of common decency in a world that Donald Trump is trying to turn evil by making Muslims wear badges to identify their faith. Let’s face it, if everyone ignored him and allowed him to commit political suicide quietly, he would be an irrelevance.

However, politicians, film stars, musicians and sportsmen are queuing up to join the “Trump disgusts me” bandwagon. People like Trump love being hated as it promotes them further and they know that by being incendiary, they will always get another platform to fuel their intense desire for attention. Trump’s political aspirations are low but his need to be seen as relevant is incredibly high and extremism is a great tool for that.

However those in the queue to be ‘right on’ people’s poets are just as bad, suffering from the same narcissistic disposition but in their case, from a platform where they are the good guy condemning the bad guy. This can instantly make them feel better about having offshore bank accounts, sending young men to war and having a string of drug fuelled encounters with prostitutes in one of Trump’s nightclubs.

The holier than thou sections of society who can’t wait to get on the condemnation bandwagon when someone like Trump pops up, remind me of those feral types who march through sink estates demanding the public execution of a social inadequate in thick glasses and dubious nylon slacks who has just been cleared of molesting a child.

They wave their poorly spelt banners around, screaming for the death penalty and satisfying themselves that although their Rottweiler recently killed the postman, at least they are not paedophiles. Meanwhile, at the top of the food chain, politicians use the same method, satisfying themselves with the fact that even though they are responsible for the accidental bombing of a children’s hospital, at least they are not Donald Trump, Nick Griffin or Katie Hopkins.

There you have the reason these people are given a platform of poison, they are there to provide an escape route for those who are not quite as bad as them. Whether it is Donald Trump, Katie Hopkins, Melanie Phillips, Richard Littlejohn, Calvin Mackenzie, Quentin Letts, it is their duty to be really nasty and be handsomely paid for it.

Just to think, if we ignored them, they would all crawl back to where they came from. However, all the while we are bombing faraway lands to support the arms industry, they are a well-paid necessary evil in the western world. We all need baddies to make us feel good and there are some who relish the role.

Donald Trump is one of them.