Why Donald Trump's voters are not bad, just mad
This is what I wrote exactly a week ago: "Seven days from now and the die will be cast. "In the years to come we may be able to tell our grandchildren how things were in the week before America officially went mad."
Well, America went mad. It voted for Donald Trump as president,
This latest heir to Abe Lincoln and Franklin D Roosevelt is a billionaire property developer and talent-show host who boasted how being famous means you can grab women by the parts you can't mention in a family newspaper.
He's a man who openly threatened that he would use Presidential powers to prosecute and jail his Democratic rival.
At successive Republican rallies, the airwaves have echoed to the style and language of Idi Amin or any other banana republic tyrant.
So why has the United States put its faith in a man so devoid of the old, cherished American values of decency and politeness?
I stick to the madness theory.
What we saw overnight was a form of collective insanity, a sort of rash, headlong rush to the cliff.
And yet it was driven by logic – and despair.
Trump's cohorts may not be able to see over the cliff but, whatever it is, they say, it has to be better than the America that has sprung up around them, a place that many of them no longer recognise as the land of their birth.
Millions of them remember the good days, the 1950s and 1960s when a family could live well on one man's salary, when houses were cheap and great cars were dirt cheap. America was the world's policeman and its defender against communism.
It had a role, a purpose, great wealth and enormous national pride.
And then the jobs went. Long-established US companies broke faith.
They relocated their factories in countries where labour was cheap. One salary was no longer enough to feed the kids.
'Welfare', a word meaning benevolence in Britain, was portrayed as the work of the Devil, sapping the American spirit.
Medical costs soared, driving millions of families into penury.
British visitors are often shocked at the glaring, no-hope poverty, the tramps, smack-heads and shanty towns, in the land that created the American Dream.
The vast gulf between rich and poor – sometimes defined as the one per cent and the 99 per cent – has grown up under what many Americans see as a conspiracy benefiting an industrial and banking elite which is in cahoots with an immoveable political establishment.
This power bloc is allegedly supported by a liberal media which reflects the chic, wealthy communities of the East and West coasts but ignores middle America.
And at the heart of this elite, as the critics see it, are people like the Clintons, endlessly smiling and promising the earth as they and the rest of the cabal get richer and the poor despair.
'The Donald' has never held any public office.
Critics condemn him as inexperienced but his fans see him as untainted by a toxic system.
Some will tell you the Trump triumph is a victory for racism, ignorance and xenophobia.
But don't be too eager to rush to judgment on millions of ordinary citizens whose only wish is for a better, fairer nation and whose only hope is that a deeply flawed man you wouldn't trust with your daughter might just deliver.
The people who voted for President Trump are not bad, just mad. Mad as hell.
