At around 11:30pm on November 5th I realized the jig was up. Some figures came in from North Carolina, and though hardly earth-shattering, I knew that if Kamala Harris was under-performing in the Raleigh/Durham area it would be a short night.
Congratulations to President-Elect Trump. He is truly a remarkable politician with an unerring ear for the moods, needs and resentments of modern America.
Now that he has swept both the popular and electoral college vote, is there any chance he might endorse a straightforward democracy that picks its president by popular vote?
For all practical purposes, the recent election concerned only the seven “battlefield” states, while the four most populous, California, Texas, Florida and New York barely got a look in.
I had returned from Ireland to cast my vote, I might as well have stayed there skulling pints, for I was one of a very few people voting at my polling station in South-West Manhattan.
Meanwhile “battlefield” voters were often forced to wait in line for hours. Thanks, Founding Fathers, the electoral college is right up there with your blind eye towards enslavement and women’s suffrage.
Despite his gloomy and often dystopian outlook, President-Elect Trump is inheriting a first class economy (as he did in 2016); unemployment and inflation are low, while growth and productivity are high.
He has promised to reduce prices, though without offering any plans, except to “drill, baby, drill.” He obviously hasn’t heard that under the Biden administration the US became the world’s largest exporter of energy.
Perhaps someone should tell him that gas prices at the pumps are currently quite low. Or is Elon squiring him around in his Tesla?
I’ve always thought of this year’s presidential contest as the pandemic election. How soon we forget that less than two years ago we were going mano a mano with Covid 19?
It will take years before we can put these crazy days into perspective. But in the meantime, there is no doubt that Donald Trump has caused a realignment in the Republican Party, and indeed throughout the entire electorate.
And what of the Democrats? Bruised, bleating and hemorrhaging demographics. When will the party understand that it can’t alienate working class and rural communities, and expect to eke out any more nail biters?
As lame as it sounds, they need a commission of street-savvy pols, the like of Joe Crowley, Tim Kennedy, Martin O’Malley, John Tesler or James Carville to point out just where they’ve gone astray.
Despite all he did to economically revivify the country, President Biden is the big loser. What was he - and his family – thinking? Or did ego blind him to his condition and the country’s perception of him?
Had he stuck with his promise to be a bridge to the next Democratic generation, there would have been primaries to test the mettle of Josh Shapiro, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Kamala Harris and others.
As it was, he appeared to ignore his Vice-President, so that Ms. Harris often seemed out to lunch on the economy, the most vital matter in any presidential election.
Although this daughter of immigrants ran a valiant race in the little time she was allotted, I doubt anyone is longing for another Harris candidacy.
Candidates aplenty are already positioning themselves to run in 2028. But the next major battle will be the 2026 mid-terms, when a revivified grass-roots Democratic Party could take advantage of the mess Mr. Trump will inevitably cause.
His choice of Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert Kennedy Jr. for cabinet posts is outrageous, unless he’s testing his authoritarian control of the Republican Party. At the best these three promise chaos and confusion.
Hopefully Mr. Trump’s positions on tariffs and mass deportation are part of his trademark bluff and bluster, for how many want the rising inflation and mass misery that will accompany the extreme measures he promises.
Meanwhile global warming is going nowhere, regardless of how many times the president-elect calls it a hoax. The national debt of $36 trillion shudders at the thought of his second coming, and who knows what rough beast lies waiting in the wings? Who had any notion of Covid 19 at the Trump inauguration in 2017?
