George Galloway: Has Trump won? Well, as Bill Clinton might say, it depends what you mean by ‘won’...

Donald Trump has ‘won’ the US presidential election because he has not lost it. A classic insurgent trope, he can rightly claim to have been a guerilla president even while often acting like a truculent gorilla.

The might of the American deep state and the unprecedented levels of excoriation, detestation and hate from the liberal classes have failed to break Donald Trump. The four-year Russiagate scam, the phony impeachment and the Mueller Report all tried and failed, too.

His vote has gone UP from 2016. The supposed ‘racist’ appears to have scored more support among ‘communities of colour’ than he did last time. The man who is said to use the N-word and to have thought Black Lives Didn’t Matter Much gained more votes from black men. The vulgar sexist got more votes from women. The man who ‘caged’ Latino children at the borderlands saw his vote rise amongst Latinos and Latinas. In fact, Trump’s vote is up amongst every demographic of gender and ethnicity except white men – the very people he is imagined to have exclusively appealed to with every Coke-fuelled burp and hamburger-fuelled pump.

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Even Trump’s supporters thought his ‘victory’ speech was like throwing gasoline on the embers still smoldering from the last riots

Virtually every commentator in America is left with egg on their face. There was no ‘blue wave’.

The president’s party – for that is what it is – won seats in the House and the Democrats’ flipping of the Senate is as flat as a pancake.

President Donald Trump has ‘coat-tails’. Who'd have thunk it?

Even the most noxious of the president’s men – Lindsey Graham and Moscow Mitch McConnell – triumphed, pulled over the line by the circus act that is Trump.

The Democratic gamble of fielding, for the second time running, the only candidate who could lose to Donald Trump has clearly failed, whatever happens next.

Centrism is not the winning hand against right-wing populism, something parties in Europe had better learn fast. In this case, the donkeys in America already knew that, but decided to test Einstein’s law to destruction. Trying the same thing over again and expecting a different result is indeed a definition of madness.

All of the above is true, whatever the final result of the imbroglio.

Trump’s brazen press conference in which he simultaneously claimed victory and fraud was exactly what a right-wing populist would do. And perfectly timed – he was well ahead in the Midwest rust-belt when inexplicable abandonment of counting for the night was the optimal moment to cry-foul. Trump might be a moron, but he certainly ain’t stupid.

He tripled his majority in Florida, and comfortably won Texas and Ohio, where the shattered punditocracy had claimed the opposite would happen. It seems obvious that the liberal-centrists of America don’t know their country at all. The east and west coast political salons – a giant, self-referential bubble – are bust. 

The man who has presided over the coronavirus catastrophe, governs a maelstrom of mass unemployment, mass poverty and extreme levels of hunger and homelessness, has somehow won. Even if it depends what you mean by won.

Onwards to the Supreme Court, stuffed to the gills with conservative justices, like a giant Christmas turkey. It’s enough to make a horse laugh.

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