Donald Trump is said to be notorious on the golf courses of New Jersey and Florida for demanding “do-overs” when he screws up.
And as Trump’s golf game goes, so goes his political career.
The world was given a tantalising glimpse a second ‘banter era’ in the early hours of this morning, as the repeatedly disgraced, twice-impeached, riot-provoking, p***y grabbing, classified document thieving anxiety machine announced his second tilt at the White House.
He confirmed his comeback so from Mar A Lago, the very hotel that the FBI raided just two months ago to recover papers that, if I remember correctly, included the nuclear codes, George W Bush’s secret egg mayo recipe and Emmanuel Macron’s inside leg measurement.
As he ambled to the podium, the deejay struck up Les Mis anthem “Can You Hear The People Sing?”
And on the evidence of this week’s mid-term election results, the answer to that question is “no.”
The setting was, of course, different to his 2016 announcement.
Instead of the great property entrepreneur, star of the Apprentice and author of bestselling business manuals descending a golden escalator to the lobby of his Manhattan skyscraper, we saw a retired, elderly man waddle into the ballroom of his Florida golf resort, deep in the heart of America's sleepy mecca for senior citizens.
But the speech itself hit many of the same buttons.
America, the red-capped crowd were told, is in a right old state. If they don’t Make Donald President Again, citizens will have to sell their homes to pay for petrol, their children will be branded racists at primary school and they’ll almost definitely get stabbed by a drug-dealing Mexican immigrant, left to bleed out on the cold, bloodstained pavements of one of Joe Biden’s Gotham-esque murder cities.
America’s status as a superpower is on the slide - which, of course, is the fault of Sleepy Joe sleeping through the last two years, and definitely not the fault of Trump spending every day of the previous four years giving world leaders chronic heartburn.
Trump’s lengthy speech meandered like a woodland stream, trickling from American Carnage horror images courtesy of Washington’s second-best diminutive Goebbels impersonator Stephen Miller to the inevitable, lengthy, off-prompter moans about endless grievances.
He mentioned, out of nowhere in particular, that Chinese President Xi is “President for life”, with almost wistful admiration.
He shouldn’t have to bother with this whole third election thing, you see. It’s a terrible inconvenience. For a start, he won the last one. Secondly, it was stolen from him. Maybe by China, who knows?
It’s always risky to underestimate Donald Trump. The streets of the internet are littered with 2015 vintage hot takes about what absolute top jokes a Trump candidacy was going to be.
But recent evidence suggests there’s one group of people that wants Donald Trump to run for President less than the Republican party, and that’s the American people.
Still, as methods of torpedoing the legacy of one's political career go, a Presidential run that will probably fail is more dignified than eating camel penis on national television.
