Oh dear Donald, do you really want to be a bigger loser than Hillary?

FOR the past year America has been talking about a “red wave”.

The American Republican Right have been predicting that this week’s midterm elections would smack their Democrat opponents right where it hurts.

And how could they not have expected victory in this week’s election?

Joe Biden has one of the lowest approval ratings in history.

Almost anyone would have higher approval ratings than his vice-president, Kamala Harris.

Both are rarely seen in public and even more rarely do they get questioned in public.

That is because neither can answer any questions.

Biden finds it hard to get to the end of a sentence, while Harris tends to talk about anything else.

All this while America goes through a cost of living crisis much like our own and an economic nightmare that would normally see the incumbents tossed from office.

Certain Republicans had a plan for what was meant to happen now.

Had there been a clean sweep of Republican victories, Donald J Trump would have taken the credit.

The monster of Mar-a-Lago would then have announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2024.

He has been hinting as much. But the red wave didn’t happen. At best there was a red trickle.

Certain stand-out Republican heroes, such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis, did well.

But the Trump-anointed candidates were a very mixed bag.

After this election Trump hoped to show that it is his endorsement that matters more than anything.

That he is the kingmaker in every state. The hope that he could make that claim just took a serious knock. Just look at some of the candidates he backed.

In Pennsylvania, Trump endorsed fellow TV star “Dr Oz”.

He is a celebrity daytime TV doctor who chose to run for the senate.

The man he was running against — John Fetterman — actually had a stroke during the race. Fetterman can hardly speak.

His campaign appearances were excruciating and the Democrats’ own media team could hardly say anything better than “Our candidate did OK for a stroke victim”.

Yet this man beat Trump’s celebrity candidate in the most expensive senate race in the land.

It was the same for Trump-endorsed candidates in Maryland, New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia.

And while some candidates endorsed by Trump did win, they tended to be in states that were already heavily Republican.

So Donald’s big bet seems not to have worked.

This week he warned his main Republican challenger — DeSantis — off running for the presidency in 2024.

But after yesterday’s results it is hard to see how Trump thinks he has the power to do such a thing.

He has already proved to be the most divisive President in recent history.

Not just for some of his policies while in office but rather the manner of his leaving office.

What Trump did in 2020 in refusing to concede the election was unheard of.

Bad result for Trump

It further divided an already divided nation. It ignored the principle of the peaceful handover of power.

And even when, after the riot at the Capitol in January 2021, Trump stepped down, he never stopped claiming the election had been stolen from him.

The main reason is that Trump hates being a loser.

It is the term he uses of other people. It is one he hates to have used of himself.

But he WAS the loser in 2020. He didn’t win the election, and he never produced evidence that he did. It was a bluff. A big, ugly, dangerous bluff.

Ever since then the Republican party has tried desperately to work out what to do with Trump.

Some went all in on him, and the election showing this week suggests that wasn’t the greatest tactic.

Now Trump has a single decision ahead of him. Whether to run again or not.

The truth is that, after this week’s mid-term results, I would be surprised if he did.

He might keep teasing the possibility to keep himself in the public eye, but these results were bad for him.

More than anything he would have liked to see a red wave, claim responsibility for it and come out fighting for the next two years.

After seeing the results this week he will have a new realisation.

That if he runs in 2024 he may lose for a second time. He will be a double loser and go down in history as such.

More of a loser than Hillary Clinton. More of a loser than any of the other people he has roasted and insulted over the years.

Trump will be looking at these polls and searching for a way out.

The end for him, perhaps, but the best possible news for DeSantis and the other Republicans who now need to race out and win back their country.

Vlad’s really a wimp

VLADIMIR PUTIN may pose as a strong man.

He certainly loves killing Ukrainians and Russians from his bunker hundreds of miles away from the front line.

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But in person it seems he’s a big old Jessie.

His advisers have told him it might be risky for him to attend next week’s G20 meeting.

The reason is that apparently one of the other attendees might “hit Putin in the face with an open palm”.

Not a slap, Vlad! Anything but that!

It is interesting how risk averse the “strongman” of Russia actually is.

He spent two years hiding away for fear of getting Covid.

Even after most of us had got over it, he was still refusing to go near any other human being.

So he’s scared of Covid, terrified of a slap. If only he realised what he was putting his people through. Not to mention the Ukrainians.

What’s the definition of a psychopath again?

Massive self-absorption and a complete lack of empathy for the feelings of others.

Whether or not the slap will happen, it certainly sounds like that cap fits.

Meta curse

IF you live in the “metaverse” can you get fired in the real world? 11,000 employees of Mark Zuckerberg’s “Meta” company just found out the answer to this. Yes.

The Facebook founder had bet big – more than $36billion big – on the Metaverse being the next big frontier for technology.

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Unfortunately the real world hasn’t shown as much interest in his fake world as he had hoped for.

I feel sorry for the people who have been laid off.

But I don’t feel sorry for the failure of Zuckerberg’s vision.

We need to work on making this world wonderful, not disappearing into some fantasy alternative one.

Cheating prince a perfect role for Dominic

THE actor Dominic West has just taken over the role of Prince Charles in the increasingly fantastical Netflix series The Crown.

As the seasons have gone on The Crown has become ever more unmoored from reality and increasingly about its republican creator’s anti-monarchy fantasies.

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However, West is a fantastic actor.

And at this week’s star-studded premiere of series five, he put on a big display of affection with his wife, Catherine Fitzgerald.

All this only a couple of years after being pictured kissing actress Lily James.

Who knows how they reconciled?

But perhaps West told his wife he was just trying to get into the role he was about to play . . . 

Lords list an insult

BORIS JOHNSON’S farewell honours list has finally gone through, and everyone has their own complaints.

Labour are crying blue murder at the idea of dozens of new Tory peers, forgetting that Tony Blair flooded hundreds of Labour peers into the house while he was PM.

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But I have my own beef with the list.

One of Johnson’s new peers is Ross Kempsell and another is Charlotte Owen.

I have nothing against either of them. Except for their age.

Kempsell is 30 and Owen is still in her twenties. This is such an insult.

Not just because they are younger than me. We all have to cope with that as we get older.

Rather because we are now stuck with these people for the rest of their lives.

They have effectively been given a taxpayer-funded salary for life.

And this is just monumentally unfair and unjust.

When David Cameron appointed Baroness Warsi to the House of Lords in 2007 he did so because she’d failed as an MP and he wanted to appoint her to Cabinet.

Long after her not low-grade political heyday she is still there, taking the public dime and adding less than nothing to the public debate.

She is now still only 51. The Lords is increasingly filled with such people.

It used to be a place where people went to retire.

Military generals, statesmen and women, titans of business and others would go in order to add their wisdom to the debates of the nation.

Now we will be stuck with people for half a century or more whose only experience of life is politics.

I’d say it’s a disgrace. But the House of Lords is full of them.