Donald Trump and friends (Image: Private Media) Wow! I completely misread the room on that one. Mind you, in my defence, I wasn’t actually in the room. Frankly, the room was too far away for me to even listen at the door and I only had news clips and reports to go off.
The room was America, and I was in Australia, safe and secure and a little smug about the whole thing. I was convinced, given the gaffes and the gaslighting and the general level of Grand Guignol on display, that there was no way on God’s green earth he was going to win. But then I thought that too in 2016 and was proved resoundingly wrong.
Why the hell did I trust those clearly biased instincts again? Was it because I’d convinced myself he’d frayed his base since then and things would be even more perilous for him than in 2020? In Philadelphia, Trump swayed people dissatisfied with the status quo Read More After all, he was a well-known quantity now: a fulminating blowhard with neither dignity nor shame; a cry-baby idiot who knew nothing worthwhile about anything, least of all his limitations; a pompous, inarticulate, opportunistic, grifting windbag; a liar, a cheat, a moral and, on a number of occasions, actual bankrupt; a felon several times over; a fire-and-Fred Flintstone carnival-barking Florida real estate salesman playing to, it turns out, not so much the lowest but the largest common denominators of aspiration and greed. For most who voted, these rank deficiencies simply did not exist — or di.
