In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the title character rouses his men to fight a battle against what appears to be insurmountable odds with a speech that includes the much quoted phrase, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

The inexplicable Trump victory in the seemingly never ending 2016 presidential campaign is a triumph of the smaller force against overwhelming numbers. It brings to mind other historic battles. It’s as if the Spartans had actually won the battle of Thermopylae against the Persians. It’s as surprising as if the Texians had won at the Alamo. Those who were with Donald Trump from the start of his campaign could paraphrase Shakespeare’s famous speech from Henry V: “We few, we happy few, we basket of deplorables...”

Like Henry V and his band of brothers, Donald Trump and his team prevailed over tremendous odds.

At the start of the primary race, Trump had to defeat fifteen other Republicans. Many of them were better organized, better financed, (Trump was using his own money), and backed by big named Republicans. Almost all of them had much more political experience.

After Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination, the road didn’t get any smoother. The Republican Establishment was against their party’s nominee from the start. Two former Republican presidents refused to endorse him, even though he had garnered more primary votes than any other Republican ever. Two former Republican presidents and a current successful Republican governor refused to endorse him.

Many other big name Congressional Republicans offered only lukewarm support. These same tepid supporters would withdraw their support, pointing to an 11-year-old video of Trump using crude language about women as their excuse.

Admittedly, many of the bumps in the road were often of Trump’s own making, with phrasing and tweets that obviously were not from a polished politician. In a way, though, his non-politically correct words sealed his image with the public as a Washington outsider.

If Trump was surprised by his rejection from the Republican establishment, he wasn’t by the Democratic establishment. The establishment Republicans were pretty straight forward in the rejection of their nominee. The DNC, Debby Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile, on the other hand, proved they had the ethics a snake oil salesman. They stacked the primaries against Bernie Sanders and gave primary debate questions to Hillary Clinton. The end result was that the Democrats nominated the most establishment candidate to run against the most anti-establishment Republican. It was not unexpected when the Democrats and their candidate referred to Trump and his followers as racists, sexists, Islamaphobic, homophobic, xenophobic and misogynists, in other words a “basket of deplorables.”

In addition to running against Hillary Clinton and the establishment of both parties, Trump had another major opponent: the main stream media. The Washington Post assigned twenty reporters/staffers to look into every aspect of Donald Trump. This may seem like a logical thing to do since Donald Trump had no political record. The Post’s argument becomes suspect when one realizes that Trump has been a public figure who has garnered innumerable news reports for at least the last 30 years. Since the Post didn’t assign a similar number of their employees to investigate any of Hillary Clinton’s questionable dealings while she was Secretary of State or the possible “pay for play” activities involving the Clinton charities, one might come to the the conclusion that the Post’s campaign coverage was slanted toward Clinton.

If the Post’s reporting had a distinct bias toward the Democratic nominee, they were not alone. According to the Media Research Center, 9 out of 10 stories in the press about Trump were negative. That the news media was anti-Trump was proven by the major newspaper endorsements. Only the Las Vegas Review Journal endorsed Trump. USA Today’s endorsement was “Not Trump.” Almost all of the other major newspapers endorsed Hillary, with a few endorsing Libertarian Gary Johnson.

Yet, Trump overcame all of these opponents and won a decisive electoral victory, although he didn’t win the popular vote. (In their wisdom, the founders created the Electoral College to elect a president and vice president. Without the Electoral College, the West Coast and the North East would elect the president by popular vote and all of us in between would be disenfranchised. The Democrats aren’t complaining too much about the current electoral system, because in most recent elections, it gives them a decided advantage.) For further see http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2012/11/defending_the_electoral_college.html

That Donald Trump is going to be our next president, is a political miracle that he accomplished against all odds.