Michael Lewis apologized to us

This is unprecedented isn't it? In a phone call with ST, the author Michael Lewis apologized to us for America's election of Trump. I quote from the article

The “undoing” in the book’s title refers to the duo’s key finding about the way people cope with abject loss. They do so by fantasising about what might have been, thus “undoing” their memory of the loss.

But that does not work for tragedies writ large such as a tsunami, because such realities are too big for the mind to blot out.

Lewis, for one, is wishing that his fellow Americans could undo Trump’s triumph.

In a telephone interview on Dec 15 from London, where he was promoting the book, he told The Sunday Times: “I want to apologise for my country to Singapore. But we’re going to try to figure this out... by organising ourselves to defend ourselves against our own president... to compensate for the idiocy of the man we elected.”

Being ebullient, he also gave an optimistic take, saying that Mr Barack Obama “came into office with pretty good public support and he was very well-liked generally.

“But he wasn’t able to do some things because they (bureaucrats) just really make it hard for the president to do a lot of big, bold things right and so maybe it will make it very hard for Mr Trump to do anything because he is not popular even though he’s a protest candidate... So it’s possible that he won’t be able to get anything done and that would be nice.”

For now, he said Mr Trump and Brexit were “the political equivalent of the financial collapse in 2008”.

Got to bear in mind that unlike Obama, the Republicans control both houses now and democratic opposition in the Senate is much weaker than before due to the deals they cut with the Republicans previously. Cannot assume equivalency with the Obama's presidency unless there are some surprising changes early in this cycle.