I immensely dislike both Donald Trump as a person and Trumpism as a political movement for a long list of fairly consensus reasons, which would be way too boring to enumerate here. I am, therefore, naturally sad that Americans – whom in my personal interactions and travels have always found to be a friendly, open-minded, and fundamentally decent group of people – have again chosen such an off-putting leader.

The election result, while disappointing, was not particularly surprising. The Harris candidacy was burdened by at least three major issues from the outgoing administration, each of which would have been sufficient on their own to lose an election: losing control of the Southern border for a while, being too late to notice inflation, and playing an impotent witness to America’s declining power abroad as war flares up all over the globe.

Once you combine the baggage of the past 4 years with the awkward, late switchover from the visibly unwell Biden to Harris – an ineffectual communicator who was the first to crash out of the 2020 Democratic primaries – the hurdle was too high. Harris did her best in the campaign and I think she would have made a good president, but that all is now irrelevant.

The Trump honeymoon will last 2 months before he is inaugurated. He does not yet have to face the messy reality of being in charge, so now is a time for imaginations to run wild. Americans, in comparison to the rest of us, are optimists, so – at least to this cynical European – the high expectations for the next 4 years seem frankly silly.

I would propose that in 2024, Donald Trump is a known quantity. There was more uncertainty when he burst onto the political scene in 2015, but since then, the world got to know him well through his 4 years in power and 4 years out of it. There is perhaps some legitimate expectation that he realized he needs to do some things differently after his first term, but 78-year-olds generally do not change massively.

Trump’s overwhelmingly defining character trait is that he is a narcissists with a fragile ego. Everything he does flows from this attribute. His number one desire is to respected by his rivals and loved by the masses. In every speech he makes, no matter the occasion or the intended topic, he reverts to rambling on about how he is the best, the smartest, the richest, the most successful, and so on.

Trump, by trade, is an entertainer. He is funny in his own, distasteful, way. He is great at improvising in off-the-cuff moments, and he is energized by the public’s attention. He dazzles the audience because he loves his job and never wants to stop talking.

Conversely, Trump is not a doer. Nothing really matters to him besides his own public imagine, and he has no deep convictions or principles. Trump loves talking about bombastic policy proposals (like mass deportations, ending the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, or radically cutting government spending), because it gets him attention, but he has zero interest in actually implementing them.

Doing things is really hard, even when you’re the President. It takes relentless dedication, work ethic, and the ability to lead, inspire, and build coalitions to set an agenda, stick to it, and deliver results. Trump has none of that. He is so in love with himself that he cannot hold a working team together as he will be quickly frustrated by his team’s perceived inferiority in comparison to his own excellence. Throughout his first term, Trump would often publicly admonish his own appointees, sometimes within months of making the appointment.

Forget his specific policies for a moment – how could a leader with Trump’s character be effective? Trump fell out with his secretary of state (Rex Tillerson), two defence secretaries (Jim Mattis and Mark Esper), national security adviser (John Bolton), chief of staff (John Kelly), attorney general (Bill Barr), communications director (Anthony Scaramucci), and vice president (Mike Pence), just to name a few.

The people who got anything done in the first Trump administration were the men (sorry, it is almost always the men) who did have a deep personal conviction on a specific issue, and were ruthlessly strategic to stroke Trump’s galactic ego sufficiently to gain power. This is why the most consequential outcome of the first Trump administration was the Trump tax cuts (a long-running agenda of the mainstream Republican elite, but not a particular priority for the Donald himself), and Trump’s own signature promises during his 2016 campaign (such as the border wall, locking up Hillary Clinton, or repealing and replacing Obamacare) fizzled out without ever coming even close to fruition.

For now, however, people can dream.