President Trump a dealmaker? Not yet

WHEN Donald Trump announced that he was running for US president, and during his ensuing campaign for the White House and in the immediate aftermath of his election victory, political scientists and presidential historians had tried to counter the gloom and doom that had engulfed members of the liberal political and intellectual elites by cheering them up with a historical analogy.

So you highly educated and smart guys, and well-bred and civilised guys in the media and the academia cannot stand that real-estate businessman from Queens, New York. He is a show-off and big-mouth reality television show host, who is so crude, so boorish, so low-class, so ignorant, who doesn't read books, and treats women with disdain. In short, he is certainly not "like us" who were raised in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, graduated from Harvard, and are so open-minded and cosmopolitan.

And to imagine that "The Donald" would be entering the residence that had been occupied for eight years by Barack Obama, the US president who was so classy, so sophisticated and so well-mannered an intellectual. Educated in the best Ivy League academic institutions, he was a friend of members of the literary set and the media elites, Broadway and Hollywood, and so much "like us". And now we're going to have President Trump for four years? What a letdown!