I wonder how many Americans are thinking to themselves ‘maybe it was a bit stupid of me to vote against Mr Trump just because I didn’t like his tweets, or how uncouth and crass he was’. I wonder not just because the US economy boomed under Mr Trump with all-time unemployment lows for blacks and Hispanics, and even women I think. No, I wonder because his successor, Mr Biden, is on course to being the worst US president since the 1870s – yep, even worse than Herbert Hoover who presided over the start of the Great Depression. Hoover, at least, was a man of great personal accomplishments before entering office. By contrast, Biden was not. And at the moment virtually everything this current president touches turns to, well, crap.  He’s got the Bidas touch. Petrol prices have doubled since he took over from Mr Trump (though they’re almost half ours). If you think you can blame this with a straight face on Mr Putin you’re deluding yourself.  Biden announced during his campaign run for office that he was going to attack and try to shut down the fossil fuel industry. So he’s cancelled pipelines, blocked drilling on federal land, done everything the far-left of his party would want. And it’s worked. (This is the Teal agenda, by the way, for all you inner-city, virtue-signalling greenies who are gullible enough to believe renewables are remotely viable.)

Biden has also overseen huge government spending increases – and remember Mr Trump was also a profligate spendthrift so it’s a big uptick on an already out-of-control US government debt. And, the incredible Biden spending would have been even worse than it has been, by far, if the Democrat senator from West Virginia had not stood up to the President and refused to pass the ‘build back better’ spendathon on steroids. (Senator Manchin had the casting vote, as it happened.) And that disconnected-from-reality fiscal policy was made worse by the Federal Reserve and its uber-Keynesian, seemingly in thrall to Modern Monetary Theory monetary policy idiocies that inspired them to print money with reckless abandon. Or at least to decide with their eyes only on propping up the stock market. (And I am not here claiming our Reserve Bank has been any better than the Fed. It hasn’t. Maybe a bit of viewpoint diversity in Martin Place might help in future so that economists dissenting voices get a look in. Just a suggestion.) Still, the result of all of this has been huge US inflation. It is being reported right now at 8.6 per cent, the worst in over forty years, but readers need to remember that the way inflation is measured was changed a decade or two ago, purportedly to account for the fact house purchases include an investment component or some such thinking. They shifted to a measure of rents but the result is that you can add about three points to today’s inflation score to get what the score would have been in the past. Yep, on the old measure US inflation is already well into double digits.  If you are in that school of economists that believes that inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon, then after printing money like a drunken Zimbabwean for years this outcome is hardly surprising.

Then there is Mr Biden’s wokery. He supported the Black Lives Matter protests and implicitly supported the defund the police movement. If there is a dumber political policy I’m not sure what it could be. Defunding and dispiriting the police has seen serious crime rocket up in the US. Some big cities have murder rates up 90 per cent.

This does not hurt the well-off, virtue-signalling progressives (most of whom are white and many with private security), it hurts people who live in really poor areas (most of whom, wait for it, are black).   Biden cannot bring himself to say a word against the lunacy of any of the transgender lobby wish-list. And the Dems, remember, bill themselves as ‘the party of science’ which is a joke – and I most definitely include in that joke criticism their pandemic response and the supposed efficacy of mask mandates (no solid evidence), vaccine mandates (ditto), and pushing the police to be tinpot despots. The Biden press spokesperson could not bring herself to criticise all the protesters outside the homes of conservative US Supreme Court justices (these addresses being leaked by lefties online) after the draft abortion opinion was leaked. Heck, the Biden administration barely managed to bring itself to say much at all about the assassination attempt on one of these judges last week, Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

I could go on and on. Yet all these factors have contributed to Mr Biden’s abysmal poll ratings – and never forget that almost all polling firms over-sample Democrats and historically puff up in the polls how the Dems end up faring. Joe Biden has approval ratings today down in the low 30s in some polls and in all of them below where Trump was at the same time in his presidency. A lot below. Last week there was a special election (to fill a vacancy) in the Texas 34th congressional district. Mayra Flores won. She’s a Republican.

Until last week the district had been held by the Democrats for over a hundred years. It’s an 84 per cent Hispanic district. Hillary took it by 22 points in 2016.  Biden won it by only four points but the Democrat congressman won it by 14. Flores last week won it for the Republicans by seven points.

Unless things change for Biden and the Democrats this points towards not just a Republican wave later this year in the House and Senate elections, but a Republican tsunami. You see I haven’t even had space to touch on Biden’s woeful foreign policy (he’s over begging the Saudis, Iranians and Venezuelans to increase oil production while every sentient being knows that Putin would not have attacked the Ukraine had Trump been in office, not least because for four years Putin didn’t).

Last thing I’ll mention. Given the political entrails are screaming ‘a Republican will win in 2024’ it’s interesting to speculate about who’ll be their nominee. My very early sense is that it boils down to Trump and DeSantis and barring big unforeseen events no one else has a chance. DeSantis would do better in the general election. But I honestly can’t see him taking Trump out in the Republican primaries if the Don opts to run.

Trump’s support amongst the Republican base remains sky high. Either way, the Dems will have a huge task defeating even Trump. Biden is close to being toxic. And the legacy media is so overtly partisan it now has next to no effect on the voters. Anyway, my brain tells me DeSantis. But boy oh boy would I enjoy the spectacle of The Don Mark II, and all the lefty, progressive heads exploding. Plus, Trump will now know that virtually all of the beltway bureaucracy (including the FBI) are politically partisan. Just recall the two-and-a half-year Russia collusion hoax, in my books noticeably worse than Watergate, and for which there has been no accounting or justice. ‘Nothing to see here, folks’, is the Biden and Democrat refrain, aided by the mainstream media.