Chunk 35: It all boils down to this.

Back in 2000, when the election between George W. Bush and Al Gore was so close it had to be decided by the US Supreme Court, Bush went unsighted for days.

At first, everyone assumed it was a strategic move to let his legal team, led by his father’s former Chief of Staff, James Baker, take charge. Only later was it revealed that the stress of the recount had actually caused a giant boil to break out on George W.’s face, so large that it had to be lanced.

Not the most auspicious start for the future leader of the free world.

So you wonder how the pressure of this election’s situation is affecting Donald Trump? He hasn’t been seen since the early hours of 4 November, when he prematurely - and it would seem, incorrectly - claimed victory. Perhaps he’s too busy lying (in both senses of the word) in his tanning bed in the White House residence sunning-up his own fresh crop of face boils?

Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that he is not particularly good at dealing with pressure. Can you just imagine the Mount Vesuvius of facial blemishes that must be developing as he sits and watches this year’s election slowly slip away from him?

There’s no escape; even Fox News has turned Benedict Arnold by being the first organisation to award Arizona’s electoral votes to Biden, leaving him just six short of that magical 270. (Benedict Arnold was an American military officer during the Revolutionary war who defected to the British; the ultimate traitor.)

Whichever way - or channel - he turns, Trump is losing.

The American people are collectively gnashing their teeth that the final result is taking so long to be resolved. Personally, I’m loving it. Let Trump’s demise be long and painfully drawn out; it’s a fitting conclusion for the collective misery he’s put everyone through over the past four years. He won’t go quietly, of course. But he will go. And as soon as the votes are all counted, he’ll realise that the Republican Party are just as unfaithful as he is, walking away from him the moment he outlives his usefulness.

The bigger reckoning for America will then be looking in the mirror to realise that, even knowing what they did about their president, some 70+ million people still chose to vote for him, warts (and now boils) and all.

A cure for that seems a long, long way off.