IT’S been a pretty dreadful year. It was bad enough that 2016 has been characterised by the deaths of dozens of celebrities who were actually talented, leaving us only with reality TV stars, baking shows and people with unnaturally white teeth. But now the reality TV stars have taken over the world. The shock of Brexit was pretty dreadful, but America refused to be beaten and wrested the title of World Champion Political Stupid back from the UK after defeating Boris Johnson in the category of Scary Clown.

A man who thinks veracity is a township in Kansas will be the most powerful US president for a decade.

A man who actually managed to bankrupt his own casino won the election by citing his business acumen. It’s said that gambling is a mug’s game, but it’s not supposed to be the bookie who’s the mug.Unless you’re The Donald.

The world woke up on the morning of November 9 to discover that the brash and boorish star of the American version of The Apprentice now has the ability to tell US nuclear missiles that they’re fired.

The only thing thinner than the gold leaf that adorns every surface of Trump Tower is Trump’s skin, and after January he’ll have his finger on the nuclear trigger.

And here we are in Scotland with one of the biggest collections of nukes just a few miles down the road from our largest city, making us a prime target.

Don’t you feel really safe as a part of this glorious United Kingdom?

If you voted No in the 2014 referendum because you were afraid about your pension, it’s not going to reassure you to know that you won’t be able to collect it in the wasteland of the post-nuclear apocalypse when Donald goes to war with Mexico because the Mexican president has sworn at him again. But look on the bright side, your grandweans will be cannibal mutants so they won’t worry too much about the shortage of employment opportunities.

And then there’s the other plus that instead of having to worry about the nuclear fallout drifting up from down south, that half of Scotland’s population living on the banks of the Clyde will be evaporated in the first strike.

Aberdeen will envy Glasgow for possibly the first time in Scottish history. So it’s not all bad.

Not everything will change. We can be quite sure that as Ruth Davidson emerges from her bunker surrounded by a bunch of mutants, she will blame it all on the SNP. Although, to be honest, it’s not sure whether Ruth will notice much of a difference, as she’s surrounded by mutants every time she goes to a Tory Party conference.

The first black American president will concede the White House to an artificially tanned xenophobe who was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. Just let that sink in for a wee minute.

And you thought Orange Is the New Black was just the title of a TV show. Turns out it was a prediction.

We’ve got a simple-minded bigot in the White House, the most complex thing that goes on in Donald’s head is his hair. The closest thing he ever described to an actual plan during the election campaign was when he advised that you should suck on a Tic Tac before you force yourself on a woman. His other plans include covering the White House in gold leaf and converting the Oval Office into a roulette table. That would be Russian roulette.

All those independence supporters on social media who went on and on about how terrible Hillary Clinton was now have as a US president a thin-skinned man whose brain can’t hold a fact for longer than five minutes, but which can hold a grudge for decades. And he’s got a very big grudge indeed with Scotland. Hillary would have opposed Scottish independence, but she’d have opposed it in much the same way that Obama did.

Donald’s opposition to Scottish independence will be personal, vicious and vindictive. The only silver lining in this very dark cloud is that Trump is so widely despised in Scotland that his opposition to independence is likely to be counterproductive. But that won’t stop it being plastered all over the front pages of the Unionist newspapers and being the lead item in the BBC news for days on end.

Criticise Trump on social media and immediately you have to fend off hordes of people demanding to know why you’re behaving just like the BBC and backing Hillary Clinton. The truth is that you don’t have to have a very high opinion of Clinton in order to come to the conclusion that Trump is a whole lot worse.

It’s a sad indictment of the world’s most powerful democracy that the voters were faced with a choice between Clinton and Trump. Especially for minorities, it’s frightening that America chose Trump. Just as we saw with Brexit, his victory is likely to legitimise the hatred by the far right.

For America’s black, Hispanic, and Native American communities, for women’s rights, for gay and transgender rights, things have taken a very dark turn for the worse. Welcome to the grave New World.