OVER in the USA, a rapist and convicted criminal with a long record of lies and hate speech has been shot at during a political rally.

Donald Trump has immediately, and predictably, set out to monetise the incident. His team is already selling T-shirts bearing the photo of him raising his fist and screaming “Fight!” in the moments after the shooting.

American political culture is notoriously violent, not least because of the country's lethal obsession with guns and because of the likes of Donald Trump who egged on his supporters to storm the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021 in an effort to overturn the presidential election.

Trump's supporters have also attempted to kidnap and kill the Democrat governor of Michigan and regularly share memes depicting the hanging or shooting of Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Trump himself has reposted some of these images, which are incitement to violence in anyone's book.

Donald Trump was shot at during a campaign rally over the weekend

Trump supporters have openly mocked Paul Pelosi, after the 82-year-old husband of Democrat house speaker Nancy Pelosi was attacked and struck on the head with a hammer by a far-right conspiracy theorist who had broken into the couple's San Francisco home intent on murder.

The same Republicans who have airily dismissed the many instances of violence carried out by their own supporters are now blaming the shooting on Joe Biden and “woke liberals” for demonising Trump as an authoritarian fascist.

But Trump is an authoritarian fascist – and his backers have a detailed plan, Project 2025, to greatly expand the powers of the president and to turn the USA into a far-right Christian nationalist theocracy.

READ MORE: Labour panned for meeting with 'extremist' architects of far-right Project 2025

Amongst other things, the plan would see the criminalisation of abortion throughout the USA, the end of equal marriage and legal protections against discrimination on the grounds of sex, gender, race and sexual orientation, and the characterisation of any media containing any LGBT content of any kind as “pornography”, the dissemination of which would become a criminal offence.

The plan would also see the abandonment of climate change goals and a wholesale return to fossil fuels. The planet would burn and civil liberties and freedom of speech in the USA would be destroyed while Ukraine is handed over to Putin. But hey, Joe Biden is old.

Back in Europe ...

England manager Gareth Southgate and defender Kyle Walker (Image: PA)

Football never made it home to England then. For weeks, Scots have been subjected to the traditional nauseating English exceptionalism and boosterism in the British media, and now that their team has lost that same media is acting as though the team bus plunged off a cliff.

On BBC News, the extensive coverage of the story was accompanied by the banner: “Defeat extends England's 58 years of hurt.” We can but imagine what it would have been like had they won.

Gracias a España por salvarnos. Thank you Spain for saving us.

We have also been subjected to the equally traditional nauseating handwringing from the anti-independence media in Scotland – which is to say most of it – over-analysing the Scottish habit of getting behind whichever country England happens to be playing as though it were some deep dark psychosis lurking at the very heart of the Scottish national psyche.

READ MORE: Scottish fan with Euro final ticket makes perfect indy quip in TV interview

It's really very simple. The real reason that people in Scotland support whichever team England happens to be playing is because it's funny. It’s an amusing little act of resistance to the overwhelming media tsunami that we are subjected to on such occasions. Because, as any Scot will tell you, the English are bad losers and even worse winners. They’re still harping on about a world cup victory that happened years before any of the members of the current England squad were even born. Had they won the Euros, we'd still be hearing about it in the 2080s.

My husband, who is an American citizen, has just sat (and passed) his living in the UK test, a Home Office requirement for anyone seeking Permanent Leave to Remain in the UK, which he is eligible to apply for later this year. He told me that on his 24-question test, two questions were related to a certain football match that took place a decade before he was born. Obsessive much?

England won the world cup in 1966 (Image: PA)

Scots also support England's opponents because it winds up all the right people, not the least of whom are those who pen anguished columns in the Scottish press about the supposedly unique Scottish tribal hatred. Winding up your rivals is a traditional part of football culture, one of the few areas of levity in the obsession with 22 millionaires ruining a perfectly manicured lawn.

Whereas sports fans in America chant DEF-ENSE, DEF-ENSE (because spelling as well as sports chants is something Americans do badly) or USA, USA. Over here it's more like: "Right lads, I've worked out this chant about the other team's goalie's recent conviction for drunk driving while on his way to cheat on his wife set to Debussy's Clair de lune. On the count of three..."

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

To receive our full newsletter including this analysis straight to your email inbox, click HERE and click the "+" sign-up symbol for the REAL Scottish Politics