It’s curtains for the truth

DONALD TRUMP has replaced the crimson curtain in the Oval Office with gold ones, because if he’s not surrounded by gold he feels uneasy. I feel the same when we’re running out of teabags.

It’s easy to feel smug about Donald Trump. Apparently Russia has enough embarrassing material to blackmail the 45th president, but so does anyone who follows his Twitter account.

For the next four years the US is saddled with a deluded President who insists up is down, that he’s a germophobe who isn’t a germophobe, that the situation is dire yet his solutions are simple, and that America can be great again provided you elect a billionaire to change the system that made him a billionaire.

Thank goodness we don’t have someone like Kellyanne Conway trying to blind us with alt-facts.

But we do have Nationalist MPs like Joanna Cherry, QC, who told the Daily Politics that ‘Scotland is England’s biggest export destination’.

Now that’s a terrific fact. And by terrific I mean ‘totally untrue’. England’s biggest export destination is America, Joanna, by billions and billions. And when we watch Trump try to bully CNN as ‘fake news’ or paw swipe the BBC in front of the world because he doesn’t like the way its reporters challenge him, it’s reassuring to think that couldn’t happen in Scotland – unless MPs Pete Wishart and John Nicolson of the SNP go and complain to your boss, and relentlessly campaign against you online.

If one good thing comes out of the Trump term, let’s hope it makes us less tolerant of made-up statistics and underlines the need for a robust media dedicated to holding our governments to account.