Nuclear physicist and former Member of Parliament Tonci Tadic was a guest on N1 Studio Live with our Igor Bobic and analysed Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.

What is Donald Trump’s political programme?

“That’s the mother of all questions about Donald Trump. The man has said completely crazy things. He talks about persecuting political opponents, says that journalists should be persecuted, claims that there is an internal enemy that must be eradicated, and proposes various ideas for deporting migrants – about 12 million of them,” Tadic remarked, referring to Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.

He added that Republicans have repeatedly said that Trump should not be taken “too seriously.”

“So I ask, what is serious and what is just a campaign stunt?” Tadic said.

Trump’s victory was not exactly “overwhelming”

Tadic also commented on the possible reasons for Trump’s victory. Firstly, he stated that Trump’s victory was not exactly “overwhelming.”

“If we look at the raw number of voters, he got 50.9% of the vote, so only about half. The country is deeply divided. The problem for the Democrats is that Trump got almost the same number of votes as he did four years ago when he lost to Joe Biden. In fact, Trump has now received about 2 million fewer votes.

The difference is that the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, received 13 million fewer votes than Biden. As always, elections are not won by the opposition, they are lost by those in power. So when people are dissatisfied, they look for an alternative,” said Tadic.

He argued that both Biden and Harris were responsible for the Democrats’ defeat.

The general population has not felt Biden’s achievements

“They were both part of this administration, but I would say it’s also about their track record. You have to recognise that Biden has led the US economy to high growth rates with low inflation and the lowest unemployment rate. However, the general population has not felt these great accomplishments, especially in rural America.

Another problem is the inflation created by the subsidies from the COVID crisis that Trump started and Biden continued. These two factors together have meant that people have not felt the benefits of economic growth. The third reason is quite bizarre – the Latino population’s fear that an influx of more migrants would further drive down wages,” Tadic explained, adding that fear of the ‘woke’ agenda and even “machismo” – the notion of rejecting a female president – played a role.

Tadic assessed that Harris did not make any mistakes in her campaign.

Biden should have stepped down a year ago, and Harris should have started much earlier

“She has achieved fantastic things in 100 days. Remember, she only ran for 110 days. On Election Day, the most searched question on Google was why Biden wasn’t on the ballot and when he dropped out. That part was poorly communicated.

In my opinion, Biden should have stepped down a year ago, but who could convince him? Harris should have started much earlier. They needed to address an inherent flaw in the Democrats: They were no longer the party of the impoverished. That demographic embraced Trump,” Tadic concluded.

“He has announced that this term will be a term of revenge – on everyone who underestimated him, on the polling agencies, on the media who dismissed him, on the journalists who mocked him,” Tadic said of what Trump’s second term might look like. He added that these elections have turned the Republican Party into a cult with a “guru” at the top, affectionately called the “orange Jesus.”

“We can expect the truly unexpected”

“His entire administration will be made up of people he likes, even if they are eccentrics, to say the least. Take Robert Kennedy Jr. for example, a man known for running over a bear cub with his car, putting it in his boot, driving around with it all day hoping to eat it later, only to dump it on top of a bicycle beneath a bush in a Central Park,” Tadic said, illustrating the potential problems with the new administration.

“We can expect the truly unexpected,” he said, adding, “If he does what he says, he will cut US relations with Europe, the Middle East, Japan and Korea.”

“Even Donald Trump doesn’t know what Donald Trump will do,” Tadic concluded.