Beautiful Virgin Islands

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

George Galloway: Has Trump won? Well, as Bill Clinton might say, it depends what you mean by ‘won’...

Donald Trump has ‘won’ the US presidential election because he has not lost it. A classic insurgent trope, he can rightly claim to have been a guerilla president even while often acting like a truculent gorilla.
The might of the American deep state and the unprecedented levels of excoriation, detestation and hate from the liberal classes have failed to break Donald Trump. The four-year Russiagate scam, the phony impeachment and the Mueller Report all tried and failed, too.

His vote has gone UP from 2016. The supposed ‘racist’ appears to have scored more support among ‘communities of colour’ than he did last time. The man who is said to use the N-word and to have thought Black Lives Didn’t Matter Much gained more votes from black men. The vulgar sexist got more votes from women.

The man who ‘caged’ Latino children at the borderlands saw his vote rise amongst Latinos and Latinas. In fact, Trump’s vote is up amongst every demographic of gender and ethnicity except white men – the very people he is imagined to have exclusively appealed to with every Coke-fuelled burp and hamburger-fuelled pump.

Virtually every commentator in America is left with egg on their face. There was no ‘blue wave’.

The president’s party – for that is what it is – won seats in the House and the Democrats’ flipping of the Senate is as flat as a pancake.

President Donald Trump has ‘coat-tails’. Who'd have thunk it?

Even the most noxious of the president’s men – Lindsey Graham and Moscow Mitch McConnell – triumphed, pulled over the line by the circus act that is Trump.

The Democratic gamble of fielding, for the second time running, the only candidate who could lose to Donald Trump has clearly failed, whatever happens next.

Centrism is not the winning hand against right-wing populism, something parties in Europe had better learn fast. In this case, the donkeys in America already knew that, but decided to test Einstein’s law to destruction. Trying the same thing over again and expecting a different result is indeed a definition of madness.

All of the above is true, whatever the final result of the imbroglio.

Trump’s brazen press conference in which he simultaneously claimed victory and fraud was exactly what a right-wing populist would do. And perfectly timed – he was well ahead in the Midwest rust-belt when inexplicable abandonment of counting for the night was the optimal moment to cry-foul. Trump might be a moron, but he certainly ain’t stupid.

He tripled his majority in Florida, and comfortably won Texas and Ohio, where the shattered punditocracy had claimed the opposite would happen. It seems obvious that the liberal-centrists of America don’t know their country at all. The east and west coast political salons – a giant, self-referential bubble – are bust.

The man who has presided over the coronavirus catastrophe, governs a maelstrom of mass unemployment, mass poverty and extreme levels of hunger and homelessness, has somehow won. Even if it depends what you mean by won.

Onwards to the Supreme Court, stuffed to the gills with conservative justices, like a giant Christmas turkey. It’s enough to make a horse laugh.


____________________________
* George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows. He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator. Follow him on Twitter @georgegalloway
Newsletter

Related Articles

Beautiful Virgin Islands
0:00
0:00
Close
The Great Western Exit: Why Best Citizens Are Fleeing the Rich World [PODCAST]
The New Robber Barons of Intelligence: Are AI Bosses More Powerful Than Rockefeller?
The End of the Old Order [Podcast]
Britain’s Democracy Is Now a Costume
The AI Gold Rush Is Coming for America’s Last Open Spaces [Podcast]
The Pentagon’s AI Squeeze: Eight Tech Giants Get In, Anthropic Gets Shut Out [Podcast]
The War Map: Professor Jiang’s Dark Theory of Iran, Trump, China, Russia, Israel, and the Coming Global Shock [Podcast]
Labour Is No Longer a National Party [Podcast]
AI Isn’t Stealing Your Job. It’s Dismantling It Piece by Piece.
Lawyers vs Engineers: Why China Builds While America Litigates [Podcast]
Churchill’s Glass: The Drunk, the Doctor, and the Myth Britain Refuses to Sober Up From
Apple issues an unusual warning: this is how your iPhone can be hacked without you doing anything
The Met Gala Meets the Age of Billionaire Backlash
Russian Oligarch’s Superyacht Crosses Hormuz via Iran-Controlled Route
Gunfire Disrupts White House Correspondents’ Dinner as Trump Is Evacuated
A Leak, a King, and a Fracturing Alliance
Inside the Gates Foundation Turmoil: Layoffs, Scrutiny, and the Cost of Reputational Risk
UK Biobank Breach Exposes Health Data of 500,000, Listed for Sale on Chinese Platform
KPMG Cuts Around 10% of US Audit Partners After Failed Exit Push
French Police Probe Suspected Weather-Data Tampering After Unusual Polymarket Bets on Paris Temperatures
News Roundup
Microsoft lost 2.5 millions users (French government) to Linux
Privacy Problems in Microsoft Windows OS
News roundup
Péter András Magyar and the Strategic Reset of Hungary
Hungary After the Landslide — A Strategic Reset in Europe
×