by I watched Donald Trump’s victory speech this morning. He was about as lucid as at any time in the last 18 months, and I got the sense (wishful thinking probably) that he might not meddle too much outside the borders of the US. So I thought, just maybe things won’t be so bad after all.
I hardly slept a wink last night. I tried watching the election coverage on Romanian TV but there was too much chat and not enough maps, charts and figures. Between 2:30 and 3am I felt confident(ish) that Clinton would win. She had what I thought was a useful lead in Florida, and everything I’d read pointed to a narrow path for Trump without that state (it was always all about paths). But then results came in from the Panhandle, much of which is an hour behind the rest of Florida and heavily Republican, and Clinton got panned there. The state quickly turned pink, and that set the tone for the rest of the night. It took a while for a pattern to emerge, but by about 5:30 it was clear that she was struggling in the so-called Rust Belt, and wow, they’re really going to elect Donald Trump. I always thought they might, but to actually see it in black and white, or actually blue and rather a lot of red, was quite something.
