THREE KEY FACTS
Barry Soper is Newstalk ZB’s senior political correspondent.
OPINION
There’s no accounting for public taste. That would surely have to apply to the American public with the election of Donald Trump.
Despite seeing himself as pulling off the biggest political comeback in the history of the world, it shows that he’s no historian.
And we’ll find out over the next four years whether he’s the peacemaker he claims to be after he calls his buddies Vladimir and Benjamin and tells them to stop fighting their wars.
Trouble with that is there’s still more than two months to run before he takes up what he has declared as the most important job in the world. Between now and then there’s a real possibility that the wars may well rark up to get them over and done with before the President takes the oath of office.
Trump met with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy in New York in September, so that was a start.
But the only reason Ukraine’s been able to hold off the Russian onslaught is because of the significant financial support of Nato.
Thing is, Trump’s not a fan of Nato, reckons the countries that belong to it are bludgers given the Americans are by far the biggest funders of it.
And the President-elect appears to have a better relationship with Putin, although how close the two are is something of a mystery with Trump refusing to say whether he’s had contact with the Russian dictator over the past year.
But in May last year, he was saying he would be able to end the war there within 24 hours!
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the first leaders on the blower to congratulate Trump for obvious reasons, given the Americans’ support of the country’s demolition of Gaza.
When the Israeli leader was in Washington recently he was told by Kamala Harris that she was unhappy with the number of civilians being killed. Contrast that with Trump’s repeated assertion that Israel should be allowed to finish the job.
It’s obvious Trump would be more supportive of Israel than Harris would have been if she had won.
With Trump winning the popular vote it means most Americans like the cut of his jib, whatever that is. Since losing the election in 2020, that jib’s been blown all over the place so what does that say about Americans?
The irony is one of the biggest turnarounds in support for him came from the Hispanic community which has since the 1970s been a Democrat stronghold. It’s ironic considering the comments he made about them eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, a state he won with the biggest majority of any President within the past 40 years.
It just goes to show that what some of us consider verbal diarrhoea flowing from his unguarded mouth, has little effect on how he’s seen. Some of the stuff he’s said in this campaign, and in his two previous runs for the White House, would be cringed at in any locker room.
But it’s kept him in the news and, like they say, bad news travels at the speed of light while good news travels like molasses.
And this President-elect isn’t a good man, he’s a convicted felon, the first time a criminal has ever been elected to the nation’s highest office. He’ll be sentenced later this month for the hush money scandal in New York.
Still, accolades have flooded in for him from around the world, including from this country.
The most pointed must surely have come from France’s President Emmanuel Macron which read: “Ready to work together as we did for four years, with your convictions and mine.”
Trump never did like the way Macron shook hands!
The victory could give Trump a broad mandate to pursue an agenda of radical change.