It’s a return to office that will test the theory that everyone loves a comeback right to the limit — and though there are millions of Americans who won’t subscribe to it, the country has chosen and Donald Trump will be back in The White House in two months.
The man who made politics his business eight years ago — only to be shown the door in 2020 as Joe Biden squeezed through — made it clear he was never going to go quietly. Indeed, he never really went away, such was the impact — positive or negative depending on your viewpoint — of his first four years in office.
Shown the door, maybe, but Trump had refused to leave the room. Still, he hasn’t conceded the last election to the Democrats.
In the end what had promised to be a long night of nail biting as polling closed in America was all over a lot more quickly than expected.
A more decisive victory than most had imagined, but no less divisive for it.
A masterfully stage-managed comeback, the golf-loving convicted felon Trump now once again promising to ‘Make America Great Again’.
In hindsight, there was almost a sense of inevitability. The replacement of the obviously physically-failing President Joe Biden late on in the campaign did little to convince Americans the party was making the right judgment calls.
In his column in The Times, former Conservative Party leader William Hague likened Trump to former President Ronald Reagan.
Reagan often reviled the government system over which be presided, and frequently denigrated experts, Hague said.
“Make America Great Again” was Reagan’s own slogan, later to be appropriated by Trump.
Reagan’s administration also abolished the regulations requiring TV channels to be fair to both sides of politics, paving the way, perhaps unwittingly, for today’s division of Americans into two separate echo chambers of liberal or conservative views — something that played right into the hands of Trump, who will go down in US history as the President who grabbed American politics by the scruff of the neck and shook it into something those of Reagan’s generation would find almost unrecognisable.
However, Reagan “would never have dreamed of instigating an insurrection” against the constitution, Hague added.
Instead, he did not bear grudges, left his defeats in the past, and worked constructively with Democrats.
If Trump is to fulfil his promise to Make America Great Again then the lesson is there in history on how to try to go about it.