What Australians should understand about Donald J Trump

I don't think Ms. Clinton has yet recanted from the view that the election was stolen.

Yet, the type of fraud President Trump was alleging does happen, most recently as found in Connecticut, with thousands of ballots being illegally stuffed.

So he was on the right track, even if the quantum of fraud to overturn the election was never detected. He's on firmer ground than Ms. Clinton.

The Australian electoral system is completely fair. What Australians need to realise is that Australia isn't America.

They also need to realise that even here, with watertight electoral laws, elections have been overturned based on "election denial," such as in Queensland in 1996.

Insurrectionist, really?

The most ludicrous charge is that of "insurrectionist." Rather than Jan. 6 being an insurrection, it was a riot that got out of control.

To accuse President Trump of using this to overturn the election is an insult to the man who, in his late 20s, with no experience building highrises, set about amalgamating the site for what would become Trump Tower, the tallest building in New York.

A person precocious enough to do that in their 20s is a pretty sophisticated thinker who would understand that sending a cohort of unarmed naifs into the Capitol building without having the army onside would achieve nothing apart from some broken windows.

They also wouldn't have offered the house speaker the use of the National Guard, just in case, a few days earlier.

We can assume President Trump got some satisfaction out of the riot, particularly as two years earlier, he'd been threatened by a crowd at the White House that burned down a church and threatened his life.

Schadenfreude was probably the reason he took some time before calling for the Jan 6 crowd to disperse.

Interestingly, "insurrection" isn't one of the 91 legal charges being levelled at President Trump, and all of those charges are pretty far-fetched to begin with, so I think we can rule out insurrection.