In the Manichean world of Donald Trump, there is one epithet more pathetic than any other: loser. He has used the term when describing fellow Republicans Mitt Romney and John McCain, critics such as Cher, his friend Roger Stone, and even American fallen heroes who died fighting for their country in France in 1918. Now he joins their ranks. He will forever carry around his neck the yoke of the one-term president, a burden shouldered in the last 40 years by just two other men – George HW Bush and Jimmy Carter.
To make his humiliation complete, Trump lost to someone he denigrated as “the worst candidate in the history of presidential politics”. But in the end, after a nail-biting vote count, Joe Biden proved himself to be a more worthy opponent than that albeit by a thin margin than polls predicted.
In 2016 Trump was a curiosity – the outsider who promised to take Washington by storm, the real estate magnate who said he would drain the swamp, the self-proclaimed billionaire who wouldn’t reveal his tax returns but would be the champion of “forgotten Americans”.
Four years later, that unconventional mishmash of qualities had to some degree unraveled. He could no longer claim the mantle of the outsider – he was the incumbent of the most powerful office on Earth; the swamp looked more toxic than ever; and the forgotten Americans were hurting as never before while Trump himself was paying a paltry $750 a year in federal income taxes.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
