Why Donald Trump wor and Kamala Harris lost

The campaign strategy of the Democrats was based largely on creating fear amongst the electorate about the consequences of a Trump comeback.

- M.D. NALAPAT

Donald Trump was brought back into the political centre stage not by his supporters but by his foes. The relentless manner in which he was charge-sheeted and prosecuted by agencies directly linked to the Biden administration or leaning towards the Democrats ensured that he would remain the most talked about, the most reported about, political leader in the US. Some in the Democratic Party say that it was Hillary Clinton, still smarting over her 2016 defeat by Trump, who convinced Biden that making him a felon would render him unelectable. If so, she shares with Biden the credit for creating circumstances which boosted rather than ended the electability of Donald Trump. With each prosecution, he came closer and closer to locking up the Republican nomination and subsequently the Presidency. The key drivers of his rising popularity, besides the countless cases slapped against him, were illegal immigration and inflation caused by the way in which President Biden assisted President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his futile efforts at forcing the Russian Federation to cede control over territories. Land that had been under the control of Russian-speaking Ukrainians since 2014. When President Vladimir Putin was given what he believed to be credible intel that the NATO-assisted military under Zelenskyy was in February 2022 on the cusp of entering Donetsk, Lugansk and the Crimea, he decided to attack first. The White House considered Ukraine another Afghanistan, where in the 1980s US assistance to those fighting Soviet occupation ensured the defeat of the Soviet military and hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead, it is Ukraine which has become a quagmire for the US and its Atlanticist allies, trapping them into massively assisting Zelenskyy in his futile war since 2022. The Ukraine war has become unpopular with much of the population of the countries on either side of the northern part of the Atlantic. Every booster of Zelenskyy's effort against the Russian side, whe