This is what a failed football club looks like.

A few days ago, former Republican strategist David Frum wrote a compelling article for The Atlantic titled This Is What a Losing Campaign Looks Like. His piece focused on the lack of direction in Trump’s campaign and how that absence of focus has manifested in bizarre actions, inflammatory statements, and most notably, a failure to seriously engage in the election. Meanwhile, the Democrats have kept their eye on the ball.

What stood out to me was an observation in Frum’s article: in the midst of all the attention on Trump’s latest assassination attempt, an important detail was overlooked. Trump, in a close election race, chose to spend time playing golf—not for the first time in recent weeks. The candidate isn’t campaigning with any real effort, leaving the burden on JD Vance, one of the most odious figures in modern American politics.

Not only is Trump distracted when he’s engaged at all, but most of the time, he’s completely out of the game. Frum explains how this absence of direction leads to the wild rhetoric, the stretches of time when Trump shows up at rallies but does little to advance his cause. The focus is rarely on politics; instead, it’s about tearing others down, creating controversy.

These are the actions of people who are losing and know they’re losing.

They’ve no plan to turn it around because their entire campaign was built on negativity from the start, and now they can’t pivot.

What fascinates me is the number of online pollsters and professional political pundits, many of whom have worked on campaigns, desperately searching for some logic in Trump and Vance’s bizarre approach. Over on The Bulwarkwhich I’ve referenced before, some are convinced there’s an underlying strategy behind the wild statements and erratic behavior.

As I’ve pointed out in the past, an expert chess player can be thrown off by a rank amateur because the amateur makes moves a professional would never. The instinct of the expert is to look for a pattern in the madness.

That’s what many in the professional punditry are doing—trying to find a coherent strategy behind this disjointed, chaotic campaign. But Frum’s point is clear: there’s no grand plan. These people are simply bad at what they do. They are losing and don’t know how to change that.

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to figure out what on earth Dave King is thinking, stirring up trouble at Ibrox, attacking those attempting to rebuild the club across the city.

But that’s not the only question. Where are the fan organizations, the social media voices? The bloggers and podcasters you’d expect to be demanding answers, sounding the alarm—where are they? Why aren’t they recognizing the chaos engulfing their club? Why aren’t they seeing that what’s happening at Ibrox isn’t just about one bad season, but the culmination of deep-rooted problems?

The manager sounds increasingly detached from reality.

There are players who want to leave, but stay; others the club wants to offload, but can’t.

One is rotting in the reserves, collecting big wages, but sidelined because activating a clause in his contract would result in a modest wage bump—not enough to justify discarding a seven-figure asset.

The boardroom is in disarray. The chairman has left, there’s no CEO, and the academy lacks leadership.

Everywhere you look, it’s floundering.

Yet for the past week, they’ve allowed themselves to be battered by King without uttering a word in their own defense. Not a syllable to shore up their position. Instead, they’re pushing absurd media stories about their young Moroccan striker being the next big thing, putting immense pressure on a lad who’s barely kicked a ball.

Contrast that with how Brendan Rodgers has handled our signings, even those who cost big money—he’s kept the pressure off, focused on the team as a whole, keeping himself and the squad grounded.

Frum’s analysis of the Republican Party’s descent into madness is spot on. This is what a losing campaign looks like. We look across the city and see the same chaos.

Ibrox’s chaos is the result of over a decade of poor decisions, starting with the days when Ally McCoist spoke about staying in five-star hotels “because that’s what Rangers do.”

Well, that was what Rangers did—and that’s why they went out of business.

The Rangers of old, with its establishment image, its dignity and respectability, is no more. Today’s Ibrox club spends more time fighting with governing bodies than trying to influence them, more time whining about past injustices than looking to the future.

Some in the media, and some of their fans, believe things aren’t as bad as they seem, that this is all hype designed to put pressure on them.

But that’s delusional. Theirs is a club in chaos, all of it self-inflicted, the result of terrible decisions and the indulgence of fantasies rather than facing reality.

It’s too late to save the Republican Party. And I think it may be too late to save this iteration of the Ibrox club. I’m not suggesting they’ll go into administration or liquidation again, but they’re locked in a cycle of crisis. The Republican Party won’t disappear, but it will become increasingly irrelevant.

Similarly, the fate of Ibrox is to become a pale shadow of what their fans remember, and the really funny thing about that is that the club they remember was, itself, an artificial construct and more fantasy than reality.

This is what a losing season looks like.

But there’s more than that.

Those who claim they are a badly run club now… where have these people been for the past 12 years?

Some of us have been singing this tune from Day 1 when Charles Green stood on the pitch before their first game and blamed everyone else for the collapse of Rangers.

They have never been a well run club. Not at any point. Not under any of their leaders.

Because all of those leaders have embraced the same policies failed over and over again.

This isn’t about this campaign. This is a much bigger problem.

Since the club from Ibrox emerged from the wreckage of Rangers 12 years ago, they’ve consistently had the second-highest wage bill in Scottish football. And it’s not just that they’ve had the second-highest wages all that time—last season, they even boasted about having the highest wage bill in the country, despite bleeding red ink everywhere.

For over a decade, the club hasn’t turned a profit. Despite the media’s best efforts to spin it otherwise, the facts laid out in their official documents are undeniable—they’ve posted 12 consecutive years of financial losses.

Every one of those losses has been swallowed by existing directors or foolish investors, buying shares that are now probably worth less than the toilet paper they’re printed on.

They’ve gone through more permanent managers in that period than any stable club ever would. And it’s not just managers—the boardroom has been equally volatile, with directors and chairmen coming and going in a cycle of constant upheaval.

And look at some of the men they’ve had there at that time.

Charles Green, one of the most notorious names associated with the club, had to resign after making a racist comment about one of his own board members.

A director was appointed although he had literally done time in jail.

Their attempt to install a fan representative on the board collapsed within 24 hours when their anti-Islamic social media posts came to light.

Then a Herald sports writer, Graham Speirs accused an Ibrox director of defending the sectarian anthem The Billy Boys; pressure from the club and allegedly from the Parks Motor Group, of which another former Ibrox chairman is head, and who threatened to withdraw advertising from the paper, was brought to bear and Speirs was sacked simply for stating a fact. That cost another Scottish journalist, Angela Haggerty, her job at The Herald for speaking up in Speirs defence.

Then, of course, there’s Dodgy Dave himself, with over 80 convictions for tax fraud in South Africa. Yet, that same man was welcomed back as a hero, despite his prior knowledge of the very tax fraud scandal that helped destroy the original club.

The madness that grips the Republican Party has nothing on this.

Dave King, even claims that it’s “crazy” to look outside the club’s familiar faces to find leadership. To those inside the Ibrox bubble, that might seem logical—but from the outside, it’s clear they’ve lost the plot. In their world, everyone else is either mad or part of The Grand Conspiracy Of The Unseen Fenian Hand.

Incredibly, despite standing on the edge of another financial precipice, their fans are demanding the board sells up—completely oblivious to the dangers. The most likely buyers will be opportunists looking to strip the club of any remaining value. It brings to mind a moment from Thomas Harris’ Hannibal where a character remarks that the fox comes running when the rabbit screams—but not to help.

This isn’t just about one bad season. It’s a culmination of years of dysfunction, mismanagement, and delusion. And it’s not over yet.

This is what a failed football club looks like.