IT'LL BE NASTY A LITTLE BIT AT TIMES... BUT IT'S GOING TO BE SOMETHING

"He died like a dog," is not a phrase one would usually get to hear in the official speech of the US president. But, then, that's a Donald Trump delivery, straight from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.

- TK VINEETH

"He died like a dog," is not a phrase one would usually get to hear in the official speech of the US president. But, then, that's a Donald Trump delivery, straight from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House. "He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way," was how the 45th president described the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the fugitive ISIS leader who blew himself up during a US military operation in Syria in 2019. No prizes for guessing whether the speech was scripted or the Don himself rewrote the original drab text into a sparkling copy, so to speak.

The transcript of Trump's spoken words, still available in the White House archives as a testimony to his chutzpah, illustrates the extent to which the businessman-turned-politician is ready to make a spectacle of himself, if it helps him connect with his supporters at a deeply personal level.

That attitude seems to have helped him 'bigly' in the hotly contested 2024 presidential election which dumbfounded every other poll forecaster. Not known to back down from a good fight, Trump had refused to accept defeat in 2019 to Joe Biden, alarming many. There were legitimate concerns that he might not concede defeat this time as well, if the results were the opposite. And that's what the opinion polls by most media outlets and traditional pollsters showed: that the poll was very tight; that his opponent Kamala Harris was leading by a narrow margin; and that he might lose again.