What the commentators said
During one of Trump’s last campaign events, said Matt Viser in The Boston Globe, he confidently declared: “It will be an amazing day, it will be called ‘Brexit plus plus plus’. You know what I mean?” We do now. The US has “stepped into the abyss”, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. Its president-elect is a man who has suggested banning all Muslims from entering the US; who has boasted about molesting women; who reportedly asked several times, during a security briefing, why the US didn’t use nuclear warheads as first-strike weapons; who has threatened a trade war with China; who has dismissed climate change as a hoax; and whose proposed solution to Isis is, in his words, to “bomb the s*** out of them” and take the oil. “I don’t know how we go forward from here,” said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. “Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly possible.”
The election result was destined to horrify millions of Americans, whoever won, said Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe. But there’s no call for alarm about a looming Trump tyranny. It would take “an across-the-board abdication of entrenched constitutional prerogatives for any American president, even the most popular and brilliant, to establish a dictatorship”. Trump will enter office with very little goodwill from either Democratic or Republican legislators. He will be “one of the most checked and balanced presidents in US history”, agreed Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. And, who knows, he might even prove to be an effective leader. With years of running large organisations under his belt, “he’s more experienced in hiring and firing than Obama was, and far better travelled than George W. Bush. Politicians of all stripes have been happily dealing with him for years – including the Clintons.”
But even if Trump tones down his act, said Gwynn Guilford on Quartz, he’ll still face the problem of how to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of his followers. He has conjured up a fantasy version of a US president: a “cowboy toughie” who can create jobs and a huge border wall through “the flinty force of his will”. The reality of politics, with its grinding negotiations and trade-offs, is very different – as he will soon discover. “The American people are ready for the greatness they’ve been promised. Your move, Donald.”
The Metropolitan Police was accused of trying to bury bad news this week by releasing, on the eve of the US election, a highly critical report about its investigation into an alleged Westminster paedophile ring. Ordered by the Met’s commissioner, Bernard Hogan-howe, the inquiry, led by retired judge Sir Richard Henriques, identified 43 serious failings by police during Operation Midland. In particular, Henriques criticised officers for relying for far too long on the evidence of one witness – “Nick” – despite multiple inconsistencies in his story; and for misleading a senior judge in order to obtain search warrants for the homes of Lord Bramall, the former head of the armed forces, and former Tory MP Harvey Proctor, among others. The report concluded that Operation Midland should have been shut down much earlier.
Hogan-howe accepted that there had been “serious failings”, and apologised to the high-profile figures who were wrongly accused. Five officers have been referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, while “Nick” is being investigated for attempting to pervert the course of justice. Proctor is thought to be planning legal action against the Met.