Trump has often joked that he kept more promises than he made, but there is a sense of truth in this wisecrack.
Mainstream broadcasters across the Western world are having a field day. With the hours ticking down until Joe Biden’s inauguration, there is a consensus view that the most erratic president in U.S. history is about to leave the White House and his enduring legacy will be those appalling images of a violent mob storming the Capitol. I’ve been asked in several interviews I’ve given recently whether I regret being a Donald Trump supporter. I’ve even been given the opportunity to repent having been one. My answer to these points is always the same: I do not regret backing him for a moment and therefore have no need to repent. Indeed, the opposite is the case. I believe Trump’s legacy is a good one, no matter how some of his supporters behaved in Washington on January 6. The growth of populism predated the emergence of Donald Trump as a political figure. It emerged not just from the financial crisis, as many commentators choose to believe, but was also born of a fundamental breakdown of trust between the electors and the elected. The phenomenon of career politicians, who make cynical promises at election times but have no intention of fulfilling them, was largely responsible for this fracture. By the middle of the last decade, the major cities in which politics is centered both domestically and internationally had begun to feel like different planets. Their inhabitants had utterly distinct priorities compared with those of ordinary people elsewhere. All of this gave rise to a new form of politics, led by people who operated outside of the establishment and who threatened to upend the cozy relationship between big business and global affairs.
