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PIERS MORGAN
Trump pulled off a comeback to rival Lazarus. From his fighting spirit to Democrat idiocy, here’s EXACTLY how he did it
Americans love a relatable, authentic politician with a blunt no-nonsense style
‘You’re going to win,’ I told Donald Trump on the phone when we last spoke ten days ago.
'I hope so, Piers', he replied, striking an unusually cautious note. ‘It’s looking good.’
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But even in his wildest dreams, Trump could surely never have imagined it would end up looking THIS good?!
He didn’t just win back the presidency.
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He demolished his hapless Democrat opponent Kamala Harris so spectacularly that he and the Republican party may end up with a total clean sweep of winning the White House, US Senate and House of Representatives.
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Unlike many, I wasn’t surprised.
For weeks, publicly and privately, I’ve been saying he’d win, just as I did back in 2016 when all the so-called experts presumed Hillary Clinton would become the first female president.
Why was I so sure this time?
As I wrote in my Sun column a week ago, the day after I attended Trump’s controversial rally at Madison Square Garden in New York: ‘This election will come down, as it so often does, to the economy. Trump started his rally speech by saying: ‘I’d like to begin by asking a very simple question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’
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‘NOOOOO!’ shrieked the audience. And I suspect, so did tens of millions of Americans who were watching at home on TV. That’s why I think he’ll win.’
Raging inflation has left many Americans feeling the financial pinch with painful severity.
And their deep-rooted worry about how to feed themselves and their families has been intensified by anger at the spiralling immigration crisis on America’s Southern border where nearly ten million migrants have come in illegally since Joe Biden became president in 2020, putting even more pressure on public services.
Donald Trump takes to the stage and declares victory
There are other reasons Trump won so big.
First, his opponents were useless.
The Democrats shamefully hid the truth from the American people about doddery Joe Biden’s descent into obvious senility for more than two years, until he self-imploded at that train-wreck debate with Trump in June.
Then they ruthlessly forced him out of the presidential race, only to replace him in a hasty, un-democratic uncontested ‘coronation’ with a word-salad spewing queen who arguably makes even less sense every time she opens her mouth.
Kamala Harris proved woefully incapable of articulating even basic policy ideas for how she would fix America’s many problems.
And after initially vowing to fight a campaign of ‘joy and hope’, she and the Democrats swiftly reverted back to the failed Hillary playbook of absurdly and offensively trashing Trump as the new Hitler, and his supporters as a bunch of ‘garbage’ neo-fascists.
I repeatedly warned it wouldn’t work, and it didn’t.
Nor did Kamala’s reliance on A-list celebrities to endorse her, from Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey and Beyonce to George Clooney and Julia Roberts.
It turns out the American people don’t appreciate being told how to vote during a crippling cost-of-living crisis by privileged super-rich stars from their private jets and mansions.
Nor did they buy into the constant Democrat claim that Trump’s the most racist candidate in history; his victory was powered by huge numbers of black and Latino men racing to vote for him all over the country.
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Then there’s Trump himself.
Like most people, I assumed he was dead and buried as a political figure after he lost the 2020 election and then helped fuel the shameful scenes on January 6, 2021, when pro-Trump rioters stormed the US Capitol to try to stop the election result being certified.
In the aftermath of that shocking day, I said I was ‘done with the Donald’ and his refusal to acknowledge he’d lost, with violent and deadly consequences, should disqualify him from being allowed to run for the highest office again.
The Republican party seemed to agree, as they moved on from Trump faster than Usain Bolt running an Olympic 100m final.
By early 2022, he was political toast and deemed so toxic that it seemed utterly unthinkable he’d ever be president again.
Yet now he is, and it’s a comeback to rival Lazarus, Frank Sinatra and Tiger Woods in the annals of the world’s most astonishing returns from the dead.
The catalyst for all this was the Democrat-led decision to weaponise the US justice system against him by hurling nearly 100 criminal charges at him for everything from inciting an insurrection on January 6 and storing classified documents at his home to paying off porn star Stormy Daniels for an alleged one-night stand 18 years ago.
I said when he was dragged through a court for that last one and became the first president to ever be convicted of a crime, that such absurd over-reach would end up increasing support for Trump and harming the Democrats.
And it did.
Trump is a master of playing the martyr, and he exploited this frenzied campaign to jail him by successfully persuading the American people, with good reason, that he was the victim of a massively unfair abuse of power by his political opponents.
Then came the assassination attempts.
In the first, Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet fired from an AR-15 rifle by a deranged lunatic lying just 150 yards away on a roof.
If he hadn’t turned his head half an inch to read his teleprompter, he’d have been killed.
As he said to me when we spoke a week later: ‘I guess God didn’t want me to die.’
Then he laughed: ‘They say I’m a threat to democracy, but I literally just took a bullet for democracy!’
He did.
And I think another reason why Trump won so big is that Americans loved the way he showed such incredible courage, resilience and mental strength when he was shot, leaping to his feet to cry ‘FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!’ without knowing if there was another shooter in the crowd.
They also love a relatable, authentic politician who spent the last few weeks of the campaign doing things like working in McDonalds and driving a garbage truck.
Donald Trump isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, to put it mildly.
He’s arrogant, bombastic, combative and prone to shooting from the verbal hip in a way that can be coarse, rude and often downright offensive.
But he also has a blunt no-nonsense style that often proved very effective in his first term as president.
Just look at the way he called out NATO countries who weren’t paying their dues and threatened to remove America’s guaranteed military support.
He was pilloried for it, but now those countries are paying up and NATO is a lot stronger as a result.
Trump didn’t declare war anywhere, forged friendly alliances with traditional American enemies like Russia, China and North Korea, took out the leader of ISIS, got the US economy purring before the pandemic, and made a good start on building his border wall to stop the out-of-control tidal wave of illegal migration.
He also stood up to the insane woke brigade nonsense that’s been so destructive to society, including the grotesque way trans athletes have been allowed to destroy fairness and equality in women’s sport.
As he said in his victory speech last night: ‘It was a historic realignment, uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense.’
And he vowed to now work to unify a fractured and bitterly divided United States, saying: ‘We are going to help our country heal.’
I hope he does. He certainly has a thumping mandate to do so.
This morning, at 9.30am, I rang Donald Trump’s mobile phone, assuming he probably wouldn’t answer given he couldn’t have got to sleep much before 5am.
But he did.
‘Piers! What do you think of that…!?’
‘President Trump,’ I replied. ‘I just wanted to personally congratulate you on pulling off the greatest comeback in political history.’
He laughed. ‘Thank you. I appreciate that very much, especially coming from you because I know you always say what you really think!’
I reminded him that it’s been 16 years since we first met when I competed on – and won - his inaugural Celebrity Apprentice USA show, sparking a friendship that’s endured to this day, albeit with the odd wobble.
‘It’s been one hell of journey since then,’ I said.
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‘Yes, it has,’ he replied, ‘for both of us! Come and see me at the White House.’
Trump’s back, and whatever you think of him, it’s a truly astounding achievement.
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