The regrets of a political junky can be many. After years of easy political prognostications, to be a failure and ground under the heel of a person such as Donald Trump is ignominy. The guy did not even appear on our political radar until March. And we foolishly picked him as an obvious loser.
But we must have known something when we touted him as a four-to-one bet against Clinton’s two-to-one on our morning line. We did not think his chances were as good but we allowed that he was in the running. We have made money at the track over the years on four-to-one horses. Our political instincts were in conflict with our handicapping.
Mind you our betting was also in conflict with our sense of decency. We really do not like Mr. Trump. This person is an affront to what we know about business, politics, world affairs and human-to-human civility.
Politics has always had a sad attraction for developers. They consider politicians to be usable and disposable. They wine them and dine them and buy them and then cast them aside. There are good developers and there are rich developers. Like in the movie industry, every project stands alone financially. Some projects are blockbusters and some are dogs. And the dogs get dog kennels. We have never seen a Trump project we would care to enter.
But the one thing we can assure you is that Donald Trump is no politician. He does not like them. They do not trust him. He fought with the Republican Party all the way to the Republican Convention in the midst of the Cleveland summer. He took over the convention and flipped the party establishment the bird! It was a time for the Trump Family Players.
But pundits were now wanting to believe that Hillary Clinton was ahead in the polls. Trump is so apolitical that he thought he was going to lose. He was truculent and self-absorbed. Even he failed to see the size of his vote and how it was distributed. It was not just the hot heads and holy rollers, it was the quiet of American Gothic. And it was the rust belt against Silicon Valley. The shock of November 8 sent a chill around the world.
But there is more to come. In the run-up to his inauguration, Donald Trump is showing his complete lack of understanding of policies and world affairs. He does not understand the difference between giving his opponents the finger and panicking the world over nuclear proliferation. Maybe, in all of this, his supporters will come to understand that he does not give a damn about them either.
Maybe, to borrow a line from Tiny Tim, we should just say “God bless us everyone.” We are going to need it!
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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