Trump’s Midas touch turns to kiss of death

As the gun smoke from the US midterm election battle begins to clear, expect the shouting to begin, starting, most probably, in Arizona, where Trump-supporting, election-denying former TV host Kari Lake lost her bid for the governor’s mansion to Democrat Katie Hobbs.  

Lake, as New York Magazine snarkily put it, can now deny her own election result, something she has said she would do if she didn’t win. Ah, democracy!

The finger-pointing is continuing after voters punished the Republicans on abortion and for continuing to push the desperately tired conspiracy theory that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, turning what was widely expected to be a red wave into little more than a leaky tap.

(Just as well because us South Africans know what red tides really are and they are never good, especially if you like mussels.)

Whether the Republicans will have the guts to turn their backs on the party’s basest base by dumping the Donald Trump albatross remains to be seen.

The 45th president is the same guy who wrote Midas Touch: Why Some Entrepreneurs Get Rich — And Why Most Don’t, in which gullible readers were invited to believe that everything he touched turned to gold.

In a fawning 2011 interview in Forbes, he said: “The name ‘Trump’ is sort of a good name; it’s the winning card, there are a lot of good things that come with that name.”

It appears that US voters disagreed, as many of the candidates he endorsed were, er, trumped at the polls.

For obvious reasons, expect this to be known in future as the Turdas Touch.