Donald Trump isn’t just off stage – he’s off plinth. A waxwork of the former president in San Antonio has been retired for its own safety because of people working out their own therapy by repeatedly punching and clawing at it. Surely they should be encouraged?

He is now in a storage room until waxwork artists can make Trump great again.

Texas is a state not normally associated with a strong Democrat tradition. The governor is a Republican and the most well-known political figure is Ted Cruz, the senator who took his kids on holiday in the middle of the pandemic and is mired in scandalous allegations that he had extra-marital affairs with five women, perhaps not in the pandemic, although the count may have gone up over the weekend.

Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks moved the waxwork of the former president because museum visitors wellied the figure, dressed in blue suit and red tie but no MAGA hat, inflicting so much damage that management had to pull it from public view.

The scratches to Trump’s face were deep. And visitors’ attacks on the waxwork multiplied as the 2020 presidential campaign boiled up last summer, although obviously not to melting point, which would have left Trump a puddle on the floor.

Not even moving him to the lobby, where ticket attendants could keep an eye out for attackers, stopped angry voters from throwing punches, perhaps even putting the heid on him.

The museum manager said: “When it’s a highly political figure, attacks can be a problem.”

They’ve always had trouble in the museum in the Lone Star state because no matter what president it was — Bush, Obama or Trump — they’ve all had people attacking them. Barack Obama’s ear was torn off six times and George W Bush had his nose punched in as people lived out their dearest fantasy.

The better news for the Obamas is that attacks lessened after he departed the White House. Before that, his statue was repeatedly shipped to Orlando where the company’s wax surgeons repaired him, but that hasn’t happened with The Donald because of Covid restrictions. And Barack Obama is now staring at an empty plinth next to him. They’re working on making a Joe Biden statute and you can be sure that will get the Trump, or thump, treatment.

Fear and loathing

HAVE I got this right? A member of the Salmond harassment committee breaks the ministerial code by leaking about how Nicola Sturgeon broke the ministerial code? No irony here. It’s a very narrow list of suspects, too. Five at the last count.

All of this spills into the toxic mix which, it’s a safe prediction, is going to be the nastiest and most vindictive election in our lifetimes. We’re not even in purdah – that’s later this week when election law kicks in – and the level abuse from both sides on social media, the exaggerations and defamations, is already a crescendo of hatred. It would not be surprising if politicians and their supporters aren’t just bathed in offensive bile but physically attacked before election day.

Ralph Waldo Emerson had it spot on: “People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.” And he did it in considerably fewer than in 280 characters.

Reverend Rangers

I USED to cover football, which I remember as being so cold that not even double thermals and the half-time pie and Bovril could defeat. Unfortunately, I never got to meet the now head of Rangers PR team, David Graham, although I did know his predecessor Jim Traynor.

The new man at Ibrox is, or was, a Belfast councillor for the Democratic Unionist Party set up by the late Ian Paisley. David, I’m told, is a man with a quip and a rumbustious sense of fun. So much so that the fond press pack have dubbed him the Reverend Paisley Road West.

Crossing the Line

LINE of Duty returns this evening, which everyone must watch, even if they don’t know what’s going on, or be desperately uncool. I don’t know much about it except that it’s had buckets of pre-publicity, there will be a high body count, and Martin Compston as Steve Arnott (I researched that bit) will speak with a strangulated estuary accent.

But Simon Allison, an employment law specialist and partner in the law firm Blackadders (full of cunning plans) believes Arnott shouldn’t even be in the job. No, he’s guilty of gross misconduct and should be bagged. He should have declared himself unfit to work due to his reliance on painkillers, he’s guilty of insubordination by disobeying an order to shoot another polis, and he’s also guilty of bringing the Met into disrepute by sleeping with witnesses and colleagues.

The show does have a legal consultant. Probably best it isn’t Simon.

Dick’s on the ball

SCOTTISH football resumed in the lower divisions yesterday and top of the card was second-bottom placed Arbroath against runaway league leaders Hearts (this was written before kick-off). It took place at Gayfield, on the lip of the turbulent North Sea and just a short corner from the pounding waves. It gets so windy and wild there that players running down the wing have been known to be floored by a live haddock spat out of the ocean. The savvy bring their own salt and vinegar.

The manager of Arbroath is the inimitable Dick Campbell. Well, I say inimitable – he has an identical twin brother called Ian, who is also at Arbroath, so it must get a bit confusing for the players when one tells them to do something and the other contradicts. Perhaps there’s an agreement that only Dick is allowed to wear the trademark black flat cap.

Dick has been around, and Scottish fitba is all the better for it. It seems easier to name the clubs he has not been involved with. As a player he was at six clubs and as a manager he betters that by one. Among them are Dunfermline, Partick Thistle, and Angus rivals Brechin City and Forfar.

Arbroath hold senior football’s record victory, beating Bon Accord 36-0 in the Scottish Cup in 1885, but I don’t think Dick was involved that day. I don’t want to tempt him away from Gayfield but there’s a vacancy at Celtic Park where Dick could throw that jaggy bunnet into the ring.

Ugly side of beautiful game

One player missing from the match is young Aaron Hickey, the teenage Hearts player who was transferred to Bologna in Serie A last September for a fee of about £1.5million. I can understand why he went, apart from the challenge, because as an 18-year-old he’s earning more than £8000 a week, after tax – €450,000 a year clear.

I know the figure because in Italy they have to publish the wages of all players in Serie A, something we might copy in this country and particularly south of the border.

It’s the same in France. L’Equipe has just published a list of the top 30 earners in Ligue 1. The first 11 are all from Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain. No real surprise that Neymar tops the list. He earns €3.06 million a month. Or about £700,000 a week, which most of the world doesn’t earn in a lifetime. Second is Kylian Mbappe on €2.098m a month, or £500,000 and small change a week.

These are mind-boggling absurd figures. Neymar earns in a week around what a Rangers player earns in a year and his annual salary is more than twice the entire wage bill of Aberdeen. Indeed it’s only slightly less than that of Atalanta, from the Italian Covid epicentre of Bergamo, who went out of the Champions’ League to Real Madrid last week and whom PSG only scraped past the year before.

It all makes a mockery of UEFA’s fair play regulations when states, and highly-unsavoury ones at that, can simply buy success. Football is gorging on itself.