What, I sometimes wonder, is Donald Trump‘s worst nightmare?
Being jailed? Perhaps, but I could see him quickly wielding his ‘art of the deal’ skills to work out a luxurious John Gotti style prison existence for himself, and of course, he’d love being centre of inmate attention 24/7.
Losing all his money? It’s quite likely Trump occasionally wakes sweating from terrible dreams about suddenly being left penniless like Louis Winthorpe III in Trading Places. For a guy who worships the dollar and all it brings, it would be the ultimate indignity.
Though losing all his hair might be an even worse disaster for the vainest man in America.
As would suffering some permanent injury that prevented him from ever playing golf again. (In one of his many almost comical hypocrisies, Trump regularly abused Barack Obama for playing too much golf as president but has now played almost as much golf in four years as president (302 rounds) as Obama did in eight (333 rounds).
But after careful reflection, I’ve concluded that there are three things Donald Trump fears most in the world – being boring, irrelevant and a loser.
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Joe Biden shakes hands with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Russia, in March 2011
So right now, the President of the United States is living his worst nightmare.
His pathetically childish antics since last month’s election have turned him into a crashing bore, an increasing irrelevance and a loser so many times over with all the failed legal efforts to overturn results that he’s now over-qualified to be a contestant on The Biggest Loser.
The most ridiculous moment of all came when he savagely attacked the Supreme Court for quite rightly throwing out an absurd attempt by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to overturn Biden’s victory – ignoring the fact that all three of his own Conservative picks for Supreme Court justices voted against the lawsuit.
Today, Trump woke up to two more hefty shovels of dirt onto his presidential grave.
First, and most significantly, the US Electoral College affirmed Joe Biden’s victory by 306 votes to 232.
That’s the kind of margin that could best be described as a ‘landslide’.
We know this because that’s exactly the term Donald Trump used to describe his own 304-227 victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
In one of his many almost comical hypocrisies, Trump regularly abused Barack Obama for playing too much golf as president but has now played almost as much golf in four years as president (302 rounds) as Obama did in eight (333 rounds). Trump is pictured above on the gold course Sunday
This means Biden is now officially ‘President-Elect’ and he will be sworn in as the 46th President of the United States on January 20.
In a blistering, albeit croaky speech last night, Biden attacked Trump for refusing to accept the result of the election.
‘Respecting the will of the people is at the heart of our democracy,’ he said, ‘even if we find those results hard to accept. In America, politicians don’t take power, the people grant it to them. The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago. And we now know that nothing, not even a pandemic or an abuse of power, can extinguish that flame’.
After the Electoral College announced its result, some senior Republicans finally acknowledged that Biden had won. Rob Portman, Republican senator from Ohio, said: ‘I think we need to respect this process the founding fathers established, and we must respect the will of the voters.’
Others nearly acknowledged it.
Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, when asked if Biden was president-elect, replied ‘yeah’ though he qualified it by adding: ‘It’s a very, very narrow path for the president. I don’t see how it gets there from here.’
Hmmm.
I’ll tell you exactly how narrow that path is, Mr Graham – it’s narrower than the world’s most narrow street, Spreuerhofstraße in the city of Reutlingen, Germany, which measures just 31 centimetres in width and is so small that people are warned not to try to squeeze their way down it or they’ll get stuck.
Now imagine President Trump trying to force his driver to take the presidential limo The Beast down that street and you’ll understand just how narrow his path to re-election now is.
But I suspect it wasn’t the Electoral College announcement or the reaction to it from Republican senators that will have had the biggest impact on Trump.
For weeks now, his dictator chum Vladimir Putin has resolutely refused to congratulate Biden on winning the election.
But last night, after the Electoral College confirmed the victory, Putin sent a telegram to congratulate Biden on winning, wishing him the ‘utmost success’, and expressing the hope that Moscow and Washington could now work together to ‘really help to solve many problems and challenges that the world is encountering now, despite their differences’.
Putin is pictured above with Trump on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Osaka on June 28, 2019
Putin was quoted as saying: ‘For my part I am prepared for interaction and contact with you.’
This was surely the final lethal dagger to the heart of Trump’s resistance?
Oh, he can stumble on for a few more weeks yet, ranting and raving about how the election was stolen from him, with no evidence to support that claim. He can continue bleating about the voting system being rigged, again with no evidence to back it up. And he can tweet himself digitally hoarse with ever more outlandish allegations that Twitter now marks as fake news almost immediately they’re posted.
But none of it will matter or change anything.
Trump has spent the past few days abusing Republican governors as ‘RINOs’ – Republicans In Name Only – because they dare to stand up to him and refuse to play along with his painful ‘THE ELECTION WAS A FRAUD!’ bullsh*t.
Yet the irony is that they’re doing the right thing for their party and their country by upholding America’s democratic values, whereas Trump himself is the one whose behaviour is so utterly wrong and anti-democratic.
He is now a PINO, the President In Name Only.
And even worse, he’s turned into a boring, irrelevant, serial loser PINO.
There’s nothing he can now do to overturn this election result.
On January 20, Joe Biden will be President, and Donald Trump will not.
Putin knows that which is why he finally chucked his ‘friend’ under the bus and began sucking up to his successor.
The ruthless Russian leader’s telegram was the political equivalent of poisoning Trump with nerve agent Novichok, Putin’s preferred method of dispensing with those who have ceased to be of any use to him.
It’s over, Donald.
Vladimir’s moved on, and it’s time you did too.