TRUMPED!

Instant Karma’s gonna get you,” sang John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1970. “Gonna knock you right on the head.”

The karma that rained down on Donald Trump’s candy-flossed head in the US presidential election was instant in the context of the election cycle: when the American people were offered four more years of Trump, they recoiled.

Though the dream of a landslide, encouraged by pre-election polls, proved to be just that, Trump’s rejection was nonetheless emphatic. As the Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes pointed out, “Trump hit the trifecta: (1) he is a one-term president; (2) he lost the popular vote (twice); and (3) he was impeached. No one else in American history has managed that particular feat.”

The significance of turfing out a sitting president shouldn’t be underestimated. Only 11 sitting presidents who sought a second term failed to win re-election; of those failures, six occurred before World War

Herbert Hoover, who twiddled his thumbs as America slid into the Great Depression in the early 1930s, was the seventh. Gerald Ford – who was never elected president and found himself in the job only because both Vice President Spiro Agnew and President Richard Nixon were forced to resign in disgrace – was the eighth.

Jimmy Carter, who defeated Ford, presided over what he called “American malaise” and was deemed ineffectual in his handling of the 1979/80 Iranian hostage crisis. Furthermore, he was up against Ronald Reagan, one of the three great talents in modern presidential politics, the others being Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

“Trump hit the trifecta: he is a oneterm president, lost the popular vote (twice) and was impeached. No one else has managed that.”

George Bush Snr was saddled with a recession, up against Clinton and tempting fate by asking the electorate to sign offon 16 years of continuous Republican occupation of the White House.

1 BIRTHER BALONEY

Karma’s first strike is that a political career founded on and fuelled by