Donald Trump's routine of spite and belligerence wins the election

I thought this would be the end of our long national experiment with… Donald Trump.

Before the election results Tuesday evening slowly made that clear Trump stood at a new beginning, not an end, I had leaned heavily on the words often attributed to Winston Churchill:

“Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.”

So far. It will be a while before I come to grips with the judgment of the tens of millions of my fellow American citizens who believed in their hearts that a new round of President Trump it was the right thing to do.

Maybe it’s because I was one of the first people to see it Trump in presidential mode – four full years before he rode down that golden escalator in 2015.

It was a sunny Saturday in April 2011. Tea Party Republicans were holding a rally in Sanborn Square in Boca Raton and their guest speaker was Trump.

Trump was not a real presidential candidate that year. He pretended he was considering joining as part of a contract negotiation strategy for his role on the reality TV show. The student.

Threatening to leave the show to run for president could ultimately land Trump a $65 million-a-year contract that would make him the highest-paid reality show host in America.

I went to the Tea Party event in the park that day thirteen years ago to hear what a “President Trump” would sound like.

The words I used for the column I wrote that day were “mind-blowingly crazy.”

He fueled the Tea Party rally with a now-familiar litany of grievances and tough-guy bravado.

“Trump these days finds it expedient to spew angry nonsense at the mouth-breathing wing of the Republican Party, which has a boundless appetite for angry nonsense,” I wrote about the event that day.

Trump had claimed that the United States was a laughing stock in the world because all our leaders were stupid. He advocated firing all our diplomats and replacing them with ruthless businessmen.

“You know, a diplomat is someone who studies hard. And do you know what they learn? How to be nice people,” Trump said that day. “I don’t want nice people.”

In the case of Iraq, he called for taking all of that country’s oil, its greatest natural resource, as part of the treasure we get if we invade the country.

“The winner takes the spoils,” he said.

Advocating a war crime didn’t surprise me coming out of Trump’s mouth, but what about all those people in the park that day cheering him on?

What’s wrong with them? Don’t they see what an unserious fool he is? I thought.

Four years later, as Trump entered a crowded field of candidates to run for president, Politico asked me to write a piece about Trump’s history in Palm Beach.

The editor told me to write it as quickly as possible. The idea was to implement it before candidate Trump’s early popularity faded.

The thinking was that Trump’s candidacy for president would already be downgraded to low single-digit support in September 2015.

But support for Trump only grew stronger. And that ‘mouth-breathing wing’ of his party that I wrote about years earlier was now no longer a wing at all, but the dominant centre.

During the final days of this month’s campaign, there were signs that Trump’s political campaign had come to an end.

The late-emerging support shifted toward Kamala Harris, experts said. A respected pollster even ensured that Trump lost the deep red state of Iowa.

It will be a landslide for Harris, some people predicted to me.

However, Trump’s political obituary was not written as the votes came in, and the map of toss-up states began to fall into the hands of Trump, not Harris.

“I think he knows the American people better than we do,” former Democratic U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill put it during an autopsy on MSNBC.

As for me, I find myself asking the same question I had after that day 13 years ago in Boca Raton.

What’s wrong with them? Don’t they see what an unserious fool he is?

Not yet, I think.

Frank Cerabino is a news columnist at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network – Florida.