TO understand why Donald Trump was elected US President, Hillary Clinton’s upcoming book What Happened provides some unwitting clues.

Take her claim that Trump harassed her during a debate last October in St Louis, Missouri.

“It was the second presidential debate, and [he] was looming behind me,” Clinton says in an extract from her upcoming book.

“Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces... He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled.”

Any examination of the video shows Clinton’s account is false.

Trump wasn’t “looming”. They each had a stool, and Trump stayed within a metre of his stool at all times. Clinton moved all over the stage, frequently walking in front of Trump to address the audience.

Males learn early the potential physical consequences of invading someone else’s space. Clinton is a clueless scold who thinks she has a God-given right to stomp all over a man’s territory.

If ever a woman gave feminism a bad name it’s Clinton. She personifies the malignancy of identity politics, which entrenches the power of the elites by dividing people into competing victim groups by gender, race, sexuality, faith.

It is the antithesis of the Christian ideal that we are all “created equal”, which embodies the American project and underpins our Western civilisation.

But after seven months, his own errors, and unprincipled “resistance” from Republican elites, sore loser Democrats, the anarchist left, the media, and the military-industrial complex, are at risk of neutering his Presidency.

media_camera Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton at the second presidential debate in St Louis on October 9, 2016. (Pic: AP)

He is neither feared nor respected by the Washington “swamp” he promised to drain, and his closest allies in the White House are gone.

National security expert Sebastian Gorka left yesterday, a week after chief strategist Steve Bannon. There is no one who championed the policies which got Trump elected who hasn’t been removed or sidelined.

Trump’s capitulation to the national security establishment on Afghanistan, in a speech last week offering an open-ended commitment of troops, is ominous. Gorka cites the broken election promise in his resignation letter: “The fact that those who drafted and approved the speech removed any mention of Radical Islam or radical Islamic terrorism proves that a crucial element of your presidential campaign has been lost.”

Trump also did not define “the strategic victory conditions we are fighting for. This omission should seriously disturb… any American who is unsatisfied with the last 16 years of disastrous policy decisions which have led to thousands of Americans killed and trillions of taxpayer dollars spent in ways that have not brought security or victory.”

Gorka and Bannon maintain they can do more to help Trump outside the White House. Bannon will expand his Breitbart news empire, and use it to monster Trump’s foes.

But Trump’s greatest test will come on September 30, when he faces a historic double deadline. Does he capitulate to Congress by raising the debt ceiling by a staggering $US2 trillion and signing off on next year’s budget, with no structural reform, no cuts to spending, not a cent for his wall, and Obamacare still bleeding the coffers? Or does he stand his ground and shut down the Government?

Whatever he decides, we will know soon enough whether Trump has drained the swamp or the swamp has drained Trump.