In 2012, Pat Rabbitte, as minister for communications, found himself in hot water when, during a debate on RTE, he muttered: “Isn’t that what you tend to do during an election campaign?”

The former Labour leader was discussing his party’s pledge in the 2011 election not to cut child benefit and was accused of basically breaking his promise. He valiantly tried to make the point that the government needed money from somewhere and had to react to circumstances of the present.

No matter Rabbitte’s later protestations that his words were taken out of context, they copper-fastened a view among a disenchanted public that political parties made extravagant election promises while seeking office and did the exact opposite when in government.

Looking to the extraordinary American election result last Wednesday, the Irish political class will hope that Donald Trump, perhaps the most unpredictable American presidential candidate yet, will ignore his many promises on the campaign trail and govern in more mundane ways than he has promised.

If the president-elect enacts his many pledges, he will spawn a trade war that has not been seen for decades, which could have enormous consequences not just for Ireland but for the whole global trading system. His America First philosophy, encapsulated in the sheer genius of his Make America Great Again slogan, promises a return to an economic protectionism that was last seen in the late 1920s. That didn’t turn out too well, and the fear of the global community is that Trump – to paraphrase Britney Spears – is, oops, about to do it again.

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But will he? After all, we have been here with Trump and unfulfilled promises before. If ever there were a candidate who campaigned in poetry and governed in prose it was Trump. Yes, the prose of his presidency was chaotic and disorganised, but the poetry of the campaign was of a dystopian kind rarely ever imagined.

It was summed up in Trump’s inauguration speech when he declared that the age of “American carnage stops right here, right now”. He painted a bleak picture of a broken country and promised to fix it. He did nothing of the sort and only exacerbated the deep fissures that have characterised the United States since the turn of the century.

For the most part, Trump’s presidency was an unmitigated disaster. He promised to build a wall on the Mexican border, and did not. He promised to overturn Obamacare, the policy that revolutionised healthcare insurance for millions of Americans, and did not. He promised to bring American corporations home, and did not.

He oversaw the longest government shutdown in American history and was impeached twice, first over allegations he improperly sought help from Ukraine to boost his chances of re-election, and second for inciting insurrection in connection with the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021. He survived both votes but left office with historically low opinion poll ratings. He blamed Democrats and what he called Republicans in name only for all these failures.

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Trump’s comeback is the greatest in American political history. It dwarfs even that of Richard Nixon, who lost to John F Kennedy in 1960, won in 1968 and was re-elected in one of the largest landslides in American history in 1972 before having to resign in ignominy and shame over the Watergate scandal. Trump has 34 felony counts, one conviction, two impeachments and six bankruptcies against him. Yet he persuaded more than 73 million Americans to vote for him and holds the Republican party in a vice-like grip.

Eight years after Trump’s 2016 win, America remains deeply divided, even if the Republican’s victory in the presidential election was surprisingly decisive. So will Trump, with a renewed mandate and Republican control of the Senate and probably the House of Representatives, finally be able to act like the authoritarian dictator he has always wanted to be?

The global community waits fearfully to see what he will do with aid to Ukraine and whether he will give Binyamin Netanyahu carte blanche in Gaza. They wonder if he could do the unthinkable and withdraw from Nato. That is unlikely but what is certain is that America is about to withdraw from all international climate change agreements. The world, like the American political map, is about to get redder.

The immediate focus, however, will be on trade. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and 10 to 20 per cent on those from the EU. This will clearly spark return tariffs from the afflicted countries and spawn an all-out trade war that will have a grievous impact on Ireland. Given the overreliance on American foreign direct investment for the Irish economy, such a trade war would significantly alter the economic outlook for the incoming government.

It sounds great to many Americans that they will have a president who will stand up to the dastardly foreigners taking their jobs and profits, but it’s not as simple as that. A viral post on X during the week summed up the difficulty that Trump-imposed tariffs could have on American companies.

The poster told a tale of the president of a mid-sized manufacturing company in southwestern Pennsylvania, made up mostly of Trump voters, having to tell his workers they would be getting no Christmas bonus as he had to buy a year’s worth of products over concerns about the proposed tariffs. When challenged by his workers, he had to explain that the foreign company did not pay the tariff as they presumed.

America First sounds great in theory but if the practice makes ordinary Americans poorer, Trump and the swathes of Republicans he is bringing with him to Washington won’t be long hearing about it. Trump won because he told Americans he would make their lives better, not worse, and that will be his overriding concern.

We can all only hope the poetry of the campaign trail translates to dull prose, but we better buckle up because whatever happens it won’t be boring.