Frankly Speaking

Donald Trump will be the 45 th president of the United States – to the shock of many people, myself included. His victory is a massive repudiation of the polling industry, the mainstream media, the Democratic Party and many Republicans, particularly most of the party establishment. The polls were all wrong. Almost every one of them had Hillary Clinton winning, right up until Tuesday morning. Trump not only won the electoral vote, which in 48 of 50 states means that the candidate with the most votes wins all the electoral votes, but throughout Tuesday night he was winning the popular vote. He may end up slightly behind Hillary Clinton when the final vote is counted. The same thing happened in 2000, when Democrat Al Gore got the most votes, but lost to George W. Bush when the Florida result was finally decided, weeks after the election. Because of the electoral vote system, Democratic candidates for president can be on the losing end even when they get the most votes. Thi...

Former Surrey councillor Dalton Jones, who's been around the block a few times, has a great expression about the United States. He calls it the "Excited States of America." This applies most particularly to its politics. In U.S. politics, nothing is more closely watched than the protracted, convoluted and messy job of picking candidates for president. This process is always at its messiest when a president is nearing the end of his second term, and the office is wide open. However, the utterances by Donald Trump, one of more than a dozen candidates in the running for the Republican nomination, take the phrase "Excited States" to a whole new level. Trump, a multi-billionaire real estate developer with an outsized personality, has already smeared most Mexicans, and Americans of Mexican origin, by suggesting that most of them are rapists, drug dealers, criminals and miscreants of other persuasions. He did allow that a few might be alright, saying ...