NOTHING sums up 2016 more than the election of billionaire Donald Trump to the role of most powerful man in the world.

Almost every opinion poll was utterly wrong, people who take great joy in telling everyone how liberal they are proved themselves anything but by immediately calling for the democratic result to be overturned, and the only thing anyone can agree on is that it was more of a kick in the unmentionables for the establishment than anything else.

Does any of this sound familiar?

As if the parallels with Brexit weren’t clear enough, Nigel Farage himself immediately jumped on a plane over the pond to meet with the man who can count a cameo in Home Alone 2 among his prestigious achievements.

Never shy of a photo opportunity, the two were soon pictured grinning in front of a golden door like a couple of lads out on a Jagerbomb-fuelled night on the town.

Again, 2016 in a nutshell.

It’s proved deeply embarrassing for Theresa May and other UK leaders that Mr Farage, who, lest we forget, doesn’t hold an elected office and isn’t technically even the leader of Ukip, is the first British politician to meet the president-elect.

Not to mention he apparently secured the meeting by turning up at Mr Trump’s office unannounced and asking to see him.

If I’d known it was that easy to see top politicians I would have been outside Number 10 as soon as I got this job.

Never one to miss the chance to have a go at the once and future Ukip leader, Carwyn Jones slammed Mr Farage for travelling to the US instead of staying in Blighty to commemorate Remembrance Sunday and not wearing a poppy, rather brilliantly branding him a “grinning poppy-less popinjay”. While the entirety of Wales’ media Googled ‘popinjay’, Ukip penned an official response claiming wearing a poppy would have been “an egregious example of virtue signalling” on Mr Farage’s part, whatever that means, and branded the first minister’s words “’look-at-me’ vapourings”.

If I don’t get a press release from the Tories calling both men ‘mountebacks of the highest order’ by the end of the week I’ll consider it a week wasted.

l Speaking of Mr Trump, a couple of days after the election last week a collection of pictures did the rounds showing the president-elect meeting his predecessor Barack Obama at the White House.

Mr Obama had made no secret of not being a particularly big fan of the Republican candidate, and true to form neither looked in a terribly good mood in any of the photos.

Except since then a series of photos from the same meeting which went largely unpublished have emerged, showing the current and future president laughing and smiling like a couple of old mates.

Why these pictures didn’t get the attention the more stern ones did I’ll leave you to speculate.

But in a world where voices of surprise and dismay at Mr Trump’s election are far louder than those welcoming it, it’s interesting that it was the more downbeat photos which got attention.

l This week the Argus reported how a Facebook page campaigning to preserve the University of South Wales’ former Caerleon Campus had changed its name to Newport and Severnside Liberal Democrats, to the surprise of its 1,500 supporters.

While it’s fair to say the city’s Lib Dem group has been at the forefront of the drive to save the campus from demolition and the page itself featured a number of posts explicitly from the party itself, changing the name of a campaign page to an overtly political group was a bit naughty, especially with council elections on the horizon.

Opinions vary on whether the change happened without warning - while I’ve been told Facebook lets group members know before a name change happens, people I’ve spoken to have said otherwise.

Whether this is down to Facebook’s incomprehensible messaging rules or a bit of chicanery on the part of the Lib Dems I genuinely don’t know.

But the row has claimed one casualty - campaigner Michael Enea, no stranger to the pages of the Argus, has quit the party and withdrawn his candidacy in next year’s elections.

I’ve written before about how next year’s elections are likely to be interesting given a spate of deselection from Newport’s Labour branch and the rise of an Independent group. And this just adds more fuel to the fire.