No one has confidence in American elections.  Not Hillary Clinton who still claims she won the 2016 election. Not Trump supporters who went to the polls armed with 100,000 attorneys and volunteers to monitor the vote.

Trump reassured his supporters that this time the vote is, ‘Too big to rig’ yet the shenanigans in Shenanistan continued throughout election day. Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee and Trump’s daughter-in-law reported that counting in Milwaukee took place in unsecured conditions and had to recommence, in eight different counties in Pennsylvania, officials tried to block Republican poll watchers from doing their job, and an observer in Cambria County, Pennsylvania reported that all of the voting machines were down and ‘No one can vote’.

Both sides claimed that this might be the last election ever fought in America. ‘When you use AI to replace every mention of “our democracy” with “our bureaucracy,” everything starts making a lot more sense’, wrote Bill d’Agostino of Newsbusters and the Media Research Center. The clip he showed on X was hilarious. ‘Our bureaucracy really is in peril’, ‘Our bureaucracy is under attack’, ‘They wanna destroy our bureaucracy’, recited the impassioned talking heads. If you are an American bureaucrat facing the reality that Elon Musk will be in charge of the downsizing of the federal government it’s understandable that you will be concerned about the security of your job.

Obama tweeted that, ‘It took several days to count every ballot in 2020, and it’s very likely we won’t know the outcome tonight either.’ Or as the Babylon Bee put it, ‘Democrats Remind Everyone A winner May Not Be Declared Until 110 Per Cent Of The Vote Is Counted’.

As votes were counted and a Trump victory looked increasingly likely anti-Israel supporters flooded into Times Square in New York to protest the election outcome waving Palestinian flags and wearing keffiyehs. Democrats started tweeting about moving to Canada. Rabbi Linda Goldstein had a better suggestion. ‘If Trump wins, you’re always welcome to join me and flee to Gaza where it’s safe for progressives’ she joked.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation featured a female commentator explaining that Trump’s ‘propaganda’ was not surprising indeed, ‘This is directly out of Hitler’s playbook’ she said. Well, why not. Democrats have been fighting elections against Adolf Hitler since at least 1964 when Senator Barry Goldwater was the candidate. ‘We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign’ said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Baseball hero Jack Roosevelt Robinson declared, after listening to Goldwater ‘I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany’. In 1968, then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee for president declared, ‘If the British had not fought in 1940, Hitler would have been in London, and if Democrats do not fight in 1968, Nixon will be in the White House’. The election of Nixon didn’t stop the press referring to ‘Nixon’s Nazis’. President Gerald Ford was accused of being a fascist and President Ronald Reagan was accused by Democrat congressman William Clay of wanting to ‘replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf’. The instances of Democrats calling President George W. Bush a fascist, racist, and a war criminal are too numerous to cite but even Senator Mitt Romney, was compared to Hitler, former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley was compared to Eva Braun and former Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan was likened to Joseph Goebbels.

While Democrats were locked in mortal combat with the orange dictator, the stakes were equally high in the Trump camp.  In 2016 Trump was elected to drain the swamp in Washington. This time, it is the borders that have been swamped by illegal immigrants some of whom have already received a fast-track to vote and who, Trump supporters argue, if they are allowed to remain in the country, threaten a permanent Democrat majority.

The tide of illegal immigrants doesn’t just represent a permanent change to voting patterns, for the working poor it represents an endless supply of cheap labour permanently suppressing wages. For communities around America it has also become the visible embodiment of rising insecurity and crime.

Yet what is most striking about the Republican campaign is the enormously broad cross section of people who came together to support Trump.

Most notable was Robert F Kennedy junior – from the Democrats most famous family –  promising to ‘Make America Healthy Again’ and taking on a David and Goliath battle with Big Pharma.

The embrace of Trump by former Democrat rising star, member of congress and United States Army Reserve officer Tulsi Gabbard was equally telling.  Along with journalist Megyn Kelly, she gave the lie to the claim by vocal Trump critic and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban that Trump is never surrounded by ‘strong, intelligent women’.

The extraordinary lawfare waged against Trump and key supporters such Steve Bannon who was imprisoned for contempt of court and Rudy Giuliani who has been bankrupted by a January 6 defamation case has played a role in persuading a number of Black American to support Trump. Trump said that when he got indicted ‘a second time and a third time and a fourth time… a lot of people said that that’s why the Black people like me because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against’. But it wasn’t just Black men. ‘All these phony charges just make me want to vote for him even more,’ said John Stewart, a white 65 year old voter from Salem, Virginia who sports a shirt that says, ‘I’m voting for the convicted felon’.

Trump has also been successful in winning the Latino vote, particularly of hispanic men. He had the support of the vast majority of Cubans but as the Democrats abandoned traditional family values there was a huge rise in support for Trump.

One of the most extraordinary features of the long reign of Barack Hussain Obama, of which this was his third term, was his despicable support for Islamist Iran. Jewish Americans largely stuck with Joe Biden in 2020 despite the extraordinary success of Trump in the Middle East achieved by depriving Iran of the billions of dollars it needed to fund proxy wars and in securing the Abraham Accords signed by Israel with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in September 2020.  The horrific tragedy of October 7 2023 and the ambivalent role played by Vice-President Kamala Harris seems to have shocked significant numbers of Jewish Americans into shifting their support to Trump. As Dr Eli David an influential voice on Twitter with 16 million followers put it, ‘First they try to imprison you. Then they try to kill you. Then you win. Congratulations Donald Trump.’

In the end, it wasn’t even close. The re-election of Donald J Trump, the Trumpinator, was, as Vice-President-elect J D Vance put it, ‘the greatest political comeback in the history of America’. The final irony was that Trump supporters celebrated his victory dancing to the strains of the Village People’s YMCA, a gay anthem. Bigots? Not anywhere in sight.