Europeans grappling with the rise of Donald Trump
LONDON -- Donald Trump was once seen in Europe as a peculiar aberration of American politics, even as vaguely amusing. But CBS News' Mark Phillips reports nobody's laughing now.
Instead, they're scrambling to learn how to deal with him, taking Trump lessons from those who know.
"What I found is that his behavior was extraordinary, childish," said Alex Salmond, who was the head of the Scottish government when Trump was promising to build a glittering new golf resort there -- a promise he never fully kept.
"As soon as we said 'no' to the Donald, then things soured very, very quickly," Salmond explained.
The European press has been full of apocalyptic foreboding.
"Madness," screamed the cover of Germany's Der Speigel. "Really?" asked The Economist, where Ann McElroy is a senior editor.
"I think the unreckonability of Donald Trump is really what is spooking people and that is what he's running on, being changeable, pulling the rug out, and being an event," McElroy said.
But if you want to know what the people really think about Donald Trump, try the bookies, where Trump's odds are dramatically improving.
"The Trump odds have definitely shortened up overnight. He was about three to one, he's now into two to one," one bookmaker told Phillips.
Two to one is a pretty good bet. Hillary Clinton's odds, by the way, are even better.
An even more sobering thought is, in recent elections overseas and in the U.S., the bookmakers have been better predictors of the result than the political pollsters.