From Dan Balz in the Washington Post today, this assessment of the credit side of President Trump's ledger makes for encouraging reading if you're a conservative, and should give you pause for thought if you're a liberal who thought that Trump's bizarre, maverick style might spell his doom:

"That’s not to say the president hasn’t had successes or made progress in changing the course of policy in the aftermath of the administration of President Barack Obama. He signed a huge tax cut. The economy is in good shape, unemployment is at a low level, and the stock market, despite some recent downs and ups, is well above what it was when he came into office.

He has changed the enforcement of immigration laws, as he promised during the campaign. He has softened or reduced regulations on businesses. He has facilitated a conservative shift in the makeup of the federal judiciary. He has pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement and sought to shift U.S. trade policy away from the free-trade consensus of past administrations.

President Trump attends a bipartisan meeting Wednesday with members of Congress to discuss gun control and school and community safety in the Cabinet Room of the White House. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

Those changes cannot be underestimated, and to the degree that he has been stymied or unsuccessful elsewhere, many of his supporters blame the Democrats, congressional Republicans or the federal bureaucracy, a.k.a. the deep state. The core of his support remains intact, and he is the most popular person in his party by a mile."

Republicans consistently rave about Ronald Reagan as one of the twentieth century's greatest presidents.  There is more than a little yearning for Reagan in their attitudes to Donald Trump. Trump himself is an admirer of the 40th president and sees himself treading the same path.

And Trump may well be right.  I was struck, when reading William Leuchtenburg's chapter on Reagan in his "The American President", just how much there was a similarity between them.  Forget the traditional smiling picture of Reagan, and consider this:

"If the casual observer thinks that Trump’s presidency is headed for the rocks, then reflect for a moment on the actuality of Reagan’s presidency.  His swingeing budget cuts condemned millions to poverty and wretchedness, cutting off millions more from any realistic chance of health care. His tax cuts benefitted primarily the very wealthy.  He sought to weaken the Voting Rights Act and became the first president to veto a civil rights act; in both his elections he received the smallest share of African American votes ever given to a presidential candidate.  He appointed an anti-environmentalist to the Environmental Protection Agency who proceeded to halve the EPA’s budget, urged drastic weakening of the Clean Air Act and refused to enforce most of the congressional regulations on the environment.  Her name, incidentally, was Anne Gorsuch, and her son became President Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee.

 In foreign affairs, Reagan actively connived with a hostile power (Iran), selling them arms in a trade that his administration banned as aiding terror when undertaken by other countries.  He went to great lengths to deceive Congress on this, and when he could evade responsibility no longer he threw those of his aides who had done his bidding under the proverbial bus, sacking them without a backward glance.   His consistent defence was that he couldn’t remember authorising such sales.  He also supported some of the most brutal and dictatorial leaders in the world, including the murderous presidents of El Salvador and Guatemala.  Early in his presidency he sent several marine divisions to Lebanon against the advice of his military chief.  Over 260 marines were eventually killed, mainly in suicide attacks, before Reagan recalled them, having gained nothing.  

For all the mishaps, for all his political ignorance and his utter disdain for the poor, working class victims of his domestic policies, Reagan is somehow remembered as a great president."  

There are some extraordinary parallels between Trump and Reagan, even down to the reason why so many people voted for them.  The above extract is part of my longer article on Reagan as Trump's curtain-raiser, and even when writing it I felt increasingly pessimistic about the chances of anyone really dislodging Trump before his time is up.

The full piece is here.

There is a lovely twitter post by the Toronto Star's Washington correspondent, who asked various Trump supporters in Washington for the inauguration their view of the man they admired.  He tweeted their responses with their pictures, without comment.  Have a read.  If you are cynical about Mr. Trump, you will find the responses intriguing, and will certainly be left asking, "But how could they think this?"

The Washington Post puts it best here:

Washington veterans marvel at how much Trump has been able to get away with because he just doesn’t seem to care what anyone else thinks. The president-elect has disregarded the longstanding tradition that there should only be one president at a time. He talked to the leader of Taiwan in contravention of the One China policy; his national security adviser has been in contact with a senior Russian government official. He’s refused to fully divest his financial holdings, given his son-in-law a government job and ordered his aides to declare war on an independent ethics office that raised questions about these arrangements.

Just reading through that reminds us of how far the goalposts have moved.  This may be a failure of news reporting, although to be fair most outlets are busy trying to hold Trump accountable; there is just so much material that it's difficult to keep track.  Perhaps the big problem is the lack of obvious public discontent.  This is still the Trump who was on offer in the elections, and I guess if you thought he was suitable to be president then you are not likely to think anything he has done since is out of order.

By way of comparison, the Post referred to the case of Tom Daschle.  A former Senate Majority Leader tapped by the new President Obama to be Health and Human Services Secretary in 2009, Daschle eventually had to withdraw over an issue of unpaid taxes (which he later repaid on being nominated).  Unpaid taxes?? Donald Trump pretty well admitted he didn't pay taxes during the campaign and it's a fair bet that several of his billionaire cabinet appointees have found ways to avoid such a tedious task.  But there has been so little trasnparency from Trump and his appointees that virtually anything goes now.  The new normal is that ethics and openness are for the birds, and much of that is thanks to a Republican controlled legislature led by one of the most cynical men to adorn a democracy, which operates on an anything goes policy if it brings party advantage.

Welcome to the new normal.  Old standards no longer apply.

This has been an extraordinary presidential election.  In its outsize anger, ugliness and insurgent appeal it has beaten every modern presidential election into a grey shadow of virtual irrelevance.  For some presidential historians you have to go back to 1828, the culmination of a four-year long populist campaign by General Andrew Jackson against the Washington establishment led by President John Quincy Adams, to find a similar one.  Even then Jackson did at least have some concrete public achievement behind him. 

The reason it has been so outsize, and so ugly, is of course entirely down to just one of its candidates – Donald J Trump.  Everything one says about this election, one is really saying about Donald Trump himself.  He has dictated the discourse of the campaign.  He has consistently dominated the media coverage.  He is the outlier, the leader of an angry, often ugly movement of alienated citizens who just needed someone to take their irrational hatred onto a higher platform.  Donald Trump is their man.  For all of his differences from his supporters – he is wealthy, well-connected, insulated from problems, benefits from rather than suffers from deals with foreign powers – he has become their messiah.   Hillary may be his nominal opponent, may even be the victor on Tuesday, but he has been by far the crucial figure in this campaign.

There is much that appals about Donald Trump, but the most appalling thing is the utterly fanatical, eyes-closed-shut loyalty of his band of supporters.  Democracy, after all, isn’t just about the leaders.  It is about the people who make them leaders.  Democracy is the only system of governance that puts the people front and centre.  And if the image they project, through the leaders they choose, is an unpleasant one, well that is the whole point of the system.  Media pundits may be trying to find ways of describing the wilful ignorance and strongly held bigotries of Trump supporters in more anodyne terms, but you can’t ignore the fact that he could not possibly have got where he is unless a significant number of ordinary Americans hadn’t bought in to his incendiary, falsehood laden rhetoric.  He has never disguised what he stands for, and the excuse that “we didn’t really know what he was like” will never be one that can be used by Trump supporters.  But then they will never want to use such an excuse, because they will never need to claw back from their support for Trump.  He is why they are with him.  His rhetoric reflects their thoughts.  His attitudes – or at any rate the ones he chooses to project – are their attitudes. 

Isolated, angry, alienated, frozen out from the modern political firmament?  Trump supporters are nothing of the kind.  They are wilful players in a toxic campaign and their views, their positions, are front and centre in this campaign.  It is Hillary Clinton, a woman who has tried to pursue her aims of civic improvement through decades of grinding involvement in the establishment process, who seems to be the alienated, isolated individual at times.

It doesn’t how many emails you destroy if you are a private businessman (Trump has deleted many thousands); it doesn’t matter how many lawsuits you face (Trump has some 75 pending against him covering everything from fraud, political subversion and sexual harassment); it doesn’t matter that you can never willingly tell the truth, that you manufacture evidence and make up issues as you go along.  If you are not a “politician”, not part of the “establishment” then for Trump supporters, that’s fine.  Do anything.  You deserve to. 

Even this weekend, the classic Donald Trump post-truth machine has been both evident and rapturously received and supported and re-tweeted by his followers and acolytes.  When President Obama – a man whose moral authority and dignity seem so far removed from the grubby Trumpian realities as to make him seem altogether elevated on another plane of existence – seeks to calm his own crowd, and defend the right of a protestor to make his pro-Trump stand at one of his rallies, Donald Trump himself manages to tell this as an example of the president “screaming” at a protestor.  Trump says he wants to punch protestors in the face; Obama tells his audience to calm down and allow the right of protest.  But in Donald’s world – endorsed  by his supporters – he is the virtuous one and Obama the unhinged fascist. 

Then when another opponent at a Trump rally holds his anti-Trump sign, the paranoia that engulfs the whole Trump campaign sees him being rushed off the stage, his mad audience shout “gun” and then precipitate a mass pile in on the protestor before he is led away with full military escort.  In Trumpland, this becomes brave Donald’s escape from near assassination.  They were tweeting this nonsense long after it was evident that it was nothing of the sort, because truth is subservient to their image of themselves as brave, isolated freedom fighters, rather than violent, intolerant thugs.

This campaign has been ugly because Trump’s supporters are ugly and they need their candidate to be so too.  This campaign has barely touched the surface of any policy discussions because that involves a rationality that has fled the Trump supporters, because it would mean engaging with the world of truth not the world of make-believe which they have constructed.   This campaign reinvents events because that’s the way they fit into a make-believe narrative.  This campaign has seen unprecedented bigotry towards Hispanics, women and blacks, because that is what Trump supporters want to see.

Democracy allows the people to come centre stage.  It is no good simply moving the unpleasantness of this campaign onto the shoulders of one man, since he represents the active desires and beliefs of his supporters.  Donald Trump is successful not because of his own innate brilliance, but because of his native cunning in understanding and encapsulating the vision of his supporters.  This is really the only way to understand how such a man can have come so close to the White House – may even be its resident for four years.  If this democracy looks ugly today, it isn’t because just one man has made it so.  It is because democracy is simply doing its job – reflecting the will of the people.  Tuesday will show us just how many people.  

Part of Donald Trump's slash and burn electoral strategy is to claim that the election is rigged.  The only way to prove, in Trumpland, that it isn't rigged is for him to win.  Trump's claims of rigging are ludicrous, but they are taken seriously by the nearly 40% of voters who are firmly in his column.

Politico notes that the Trump strategy could have serious repercussions for American democracy after the election, especially if Republican leaders keep the same silence on the result that they've been keeping about the campaign itself.  Trump cites media coverage as his main "evidence", but let's just consider for a moment the other case - that the election is rigged against Hillary Clinton.

If you were Hillary, and you had the same political nihilism as Trump, you could cite the following:

1.  The consistent hacking of Democrat emails by Wikileaks and possible (though only alleged) Russian agencies.  Wikileaks has emerged firmly in the Trump camp, and hasn't undertaken any leaks against Trump and his associates at all.  The leaks, no matter how innocuous or explainable, consistently hurt Hillary.

2.  The mainstream media insistence on "equivalence" between Hillary and Trump.  Trump is arguably the worst candidate in American history, lies consistently, has failed to pay income tax or declare his tax returns, is a four-time bankrupt, has sexually assaulted women, uses dangerous rhetoric against minority groups, has run businesses that have destroyed the livelihoods of small workers, cosies up to one of America's biggest foreign foes.  Hillary's record doesn't even begin to touch all of this, yet is portrayed in the media as being somehow equivalent.  This campaign is indeed destroying American democracy, but the destructive impetus comes from one side only.

3.  The Republicans have history in rigged elections, as witness the "Gore v Bush" 2000 one.  Al Gore won the popular vote, and a predominantly Republican appointed Supreme Court decided in favour of the Republican nominee in the highly disputed Florida count.  The Democratic nominee, Gore, conceded as soon as the decision was made.

4.  Election machinery in each state is in the hands of state governance.  31 states have Republican governors, only 18 have Democratic governors.  It was a Republican governor's administration in Florida in 2000 which determined the Republican outcome of that state's vote.

5.  Mainstream media may lean towards Clinton (but see point 2 above), but much other media leans heavily towards Trump, including Talk Radio and the still much watched Fox News, who present Trump's outlandish and palpably false claims uncritically.

6.  The Trump campaign is the culmination of more than two decades of well-funded, committed and consistent denigration of the Clintons by Republican right-wingers.  From the millions poured in by Richard Mellon Scaife to things such as the Arkansas Project in the 90s, through the special prosecution of Bill Clinton by Republican activist judge Kenneth Starr, to the present day, the Clintons in particular have been the target of unrelenting abuse.  There is a whole Republican industry dedicated simply to destroying the Clintons and reversing their and President Obama's liberal agenda.  Nothing similar exists on the Democratic side.

7.  The last boundary changes for the House of Representatives saw one of the most audacious gerrymanders in modern representative politics (detailed in a book by Salon's David Daley).  While the Senate could change hands, there is virtually no possibility of the House doing so - it will stay Republican.

Donald Trump is the Republican Party's Frankenstein, and his claims of election rigging would have more resonance if they were spouted by a Democrat.  At the moment, though, Democrats still believe in the American system and refuse to denigrate it.  When media outlets talk of a "dirty election" and how it threaten American democracy, it's worth remembering that their false attempts at equivalence hide the fact that only one party, and its atrocious nominee, are engaged in that work.

A few quick takeaways from tonight's Trump v Clinton debate.

1.  Hillary Clinton is not great at being able to take down a great hulking target standing right next to her.  Perhaps she's wary because of the various scandals attached to her own person, but such scandals are in no way equivalent to the host of issues suggesting Trump is unfit for high office.

2. Trump really has no use for his vice-presidential running mate.  Rarely has a No 2 been so publicly humiliated as Mike Pence was tonight when Trump dismissed his views with the words "He and I haven't spoken and I disagree".  If Pence had any dignity left he would leave the ticket.  He hasn't and he won't.

3.  Trump could have been a nightclub bouncer; his body language was tense and uneasy throughout and he wouldn't sit down, preferring to loom ominously over the set.

4.  Trump got off lightly over the video of his sexist comments - or virtual endorsement of sexual harassment - and shoudn't have done.

5.  Trump wants to put in place criminal proceedings against his opponent if he wins, with the intention of seeing her jailed.  He would do well in an authoritarian banana republic.

6.  Hillary is far more comfortable talking policy than debating, and it showed.  She allowed Trump to lead the debate several times.  She's not an instinctive politician in the way her husband or Obama are.

7.  This debate will have changed few minds, but it may well have entrenched their respective supporters behind the two candidates.

8.  Trump is awful.  He is grotesque, lies congenitally, has few ideas about the policies he name-checks, is brutalistic and should never have been a contender.  But you get the democracy you vote for.

Plenty of keyboards have already been called into action to provide quick analyses of last night's stormer of a presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  To give just a flavour of some of the more prescient online commentary, this is the Washington Post take from Dana Milbank; Howard Kurtz gives a pretty balanced view from the right of the spectrum on Fox News; while the liberal viewpoint is most articulately expressed by Michelle Goldberg on Slate.  Politico meanwhile remains a forcing house of regular and detailed commentaries.

The commentariat consensus is that Hillary won - and unequivocally so.  Even Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani admitted as much in a tweet he sent.  But Giuliani's tweet also offers - unusually - a proper cautionary note for the Clintonites.  She may win the debate and the plaudits of political insiders, as well as those voters who are more politically switched on than their peers.  Whether the debate will have translated that into an appeal to those who are largely alienated by politics is another matter, and Trump's one decent gambit last night was to keep identifying Clinton with the "failed" political establishment.

We already know that the hard-core Trump supporters will never be convinced by anything other than what Clinton characterised as a "Trump reality" that bears little relation to facts.  What Clinton needed to do was to try and win back some of that support which she appeared to have after the Democratic convention but which has dissipated over the course of the summer.

Certainly Mrs. Clinton exceeded expectations in the debate, while Trump probably came in under his.  All the more remarkable given that expectations for Clinton were already high - she was seen as a capable and professional debater who masters her brief exceptionally well - and those for Trump were correspondingly low - he was seen as a man of bluster and bluff with little regard for the facts.

It turned out to be Clinton who scored the more aggressive hits, on Trump's income tax returns, his "stiffing" of ordinary workers who worked for his companies, or his racism over the Obama Birther affair.  She maintained poise, looked relaxed, went in for the kill with appropriate but not over the top aggression.  She arguably didn't press one or two issues enough.  She could have pressed further on his tax returns, or seized upon his implicit admission that he hadn't paid federal tax in years.  She could have pressed on his pursuit of Obama's birth well after the president made his birth certificate public.  She could have been specific in calling him out as an early supporter of the Iraq war.  But these are quibbles.  The debate went well for her.  The only issue is whether it will have been enough to bring voters back into the fold.

For Trump, the issue is a little different.  He has defied all expectations and all campaigning conventions to get where he is today - that is, within a whisker of winning the White House.  No-one expects him to be articulate, no-one even really expects him to understand and ally himself with facts or, more broadly, the truth.  None of his nearly 40% of hard-core supporters are going to move away from him simply because his blustery one-liners didn't work in a debate, or because he was called out on various contortions of reality, or even because he is a giant narcissist who only talked about himself.  So emotionally based is his appeal that it is impervious to facts and events.   I thought one of his most astute points was when he noted that Clinton had spent hundreds of millions of pounds on television adverts attacking him, while he had spent nothing, and yet they were still level-pegging in the polls.

Trump is the anti-candidate, and to succeed he just needs to continue to exist.  The real issue for America in November is whether enough American voters - especially those in the so-called swing states - are nihilistic, alienated and angry enough to tell reality to go hang and put Trump in the White House.  We already know he can't get there because he is better qualified, or more astute, or has a better understanding of politics, or is a more eloquent and articulate speaker.  He is none of these things and Clinton beats him handily on each one.  Her unpopularity remains mysterious in many ways for a woman who has genuinely dedicated herself to a lifetime of public service, and who has come up from relatively humble origins.  But she is now the single most lethal personification of the politics of old, of the establishment, and if enough people are alienated from all of that, then she can't win them over.

This is an election between primal instinct and rational thought, and rational thought has an uphill battle.  That is why it may not matter that Hillary Clinton won the debate.  Donald Trump isn't campaigning that way, and his support base isn't interested.  So if you haven't yet seen it yet do watch it and enjoy - it was a great and rumbustuous debate (although the audience should have been allowed to make more noise!).  But for all the viewership - the highest for any presidential debate - it may not have mattered much.

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This year's Republican convention has been a mess.  A delightfully anarchistic mess for those of us who do not wish him well, but a mess nonetheless.  Although he is unchallenged as the Republican nominee, he still faced a floor challenge to his candidacy.  In previous conventions - and you have to go back to 1976 for this - you at least had to have another candidate to rally round, but not this time.

Donald's wife gave a speech that had significant elements plagiarised from Michelle Obama's 2008 convention speech, which gave us the excellent spectacle of hardened Trumpites loudly applauding the sentiments of the current First Lady.

The principal speakers at the convention have all shown clear signs of madness.  Rudy Giuliani, once a respected New York mayor, tried to be Donald Trump on acid.  Chris Christie, once a governor who briefly looked as if he could reach across partisan divides, played his role as chief witch-hunter (prosecuting chief witch Hillary Clinton) to a perfection that would have been admired in Salem back in the day.

Only Ted Cruz - Ted Cruz!! - has emerged with any credit from this nonsense, and he did so by adding to the fiasco.  Unlike Marco Rubio - who prostrated himself on video before the Donald - Cruz used his convention speaking slot to basically stab Trump in the front.  He clearly loved doing it.  I think Cruz is in many respects a repulsive politician, probably in league with the sulphur burners, but he did this bit very well.

Yet despite it all, it probably doesn't matter.  The Telegraph's Tim Stanley makes a good case for suggesting that the conservative Cruz has fatally holed the Trump candidacy, but I'm not so sure.  Trump has succeeded on the back of a lamentable campaign that would have sunk anyone else.  But that is rather the point of Trump.  The media classes and the liberals and all those who hate him have rejoiced in a hopeless, divided convention.

Trump's supporters won't have heard any of that.  All they want to see and hear is their man telling them that all the ills of the world, all of their own poverty and economic dislocation, is down to dastardly forces and people who can be evicted from American society.  He'll tell them that again and they'll lap it up.  He won't lose any of that support on the basis of a lamentable convention week.  

Liberal democracy is in crisis at the moment because it turns out that it has failed to gain the support of significant numbers of left-behind voters.  In America, Trump has those people.  If it turns out there are actually more of them than there are of the many different groups Trump offends, then he's on course for the White House.  His convention plays no role in that calculation.

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This is appalling reading.  Well, it's appalling reading if you're not a racist, homophobic, mysoginistic, immigrant-baiting, Muslim-banning bigot who also wants to beat up anyone who disagrees with you.

Jared Yates Sexton is a professor and political writer, and he went along to a Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina.  What he encountered there was a microcosmic representation of the Trump campaign in all of its ugly, discoloured reality.

Amongst the Confederate flags, drunken attendees, tasteless T-shirts and open misogyny towards Hillary Clinton was a palpably nasty atmosphere.  In the end, Yates concluded that yes, of course Trump should be defeated in the same way that a virus needs to be stopped in its tracks, but that the bigger question was how on earth to combat the deeply unpleasant, hate-filled people who are giving Trump such an extraordinary reach.

Of course Sexton is educated, a liberal, a man who thinks about what he's watching and doing.  Of course he approaches the Trump rally with a sense of foreboding and perhaps even slight derision.  Perhaps someone else would have gone along and seen a happy band of cheerful soldiers celebrating together and rooting for their unafraid champion.

But read his tweets for yourself and see if you think he was making it all up, or reporting accurately from a terrible event.  I wish it had been the former.

[Hat-tip to Politics.co.uk's Ian Dunt, who re-tweeted the Yates tweets]

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For a while I flirted with the idea that Donald Trump is an entertaining candidate.  I liked the fact that he was shaking up traditional politics and sneakily admired the way his sheer chutzpah seemed to be getting him through the primaries.

But Donald Trump is no joke, and it will arguably be his greatest achievement to keep us seeing him as a rough-edged diamond making headway against a wretchedly corrupt establishment, instead of the dangerous demagogue and bigot that he really is.

It seems absurd at the moment that it is the Democratic Party which is in disarray, and not the party which has just seen a debt-driven real-estate chancer and reality television star seize their nomination from under their noses.  The Republican high command isn't just holding its nose to endorse Trump.  It is leaping willingly into the position of co-conspirator.  As House Speaker Paul Ryan becomes the latest leading Republican to endorse Donald Trump, let's remind ourselves of the person that all these top politicians now believe is absolutely the right person to lead their country for four years.

This is the man who has accused his now supporter, Ted Cruz, of "coming from Cuba" and suggesting he should have been disbarred from running for president.  This is the man who wants to ban all Muslims from America and who has happily perpetuated the myth that Muslims were celebrating in the streets of New Jersey on 9/11.  This is the man who wants to build a wall to stop any Mexicans from entering America, and who has described Mexican immigrants as "drug mules or rapists".  This is the man who has used the sly rhetoric of religious bigotry when he had a go at then-rival Ben Carson's membership of the Seventh Day Adventist Church.  Slate writer William Saletan has done a great job in identifying the ten things any politician who endorses Trump needs to defend.

Trump's inherent racism and malevolence go deeper than this though.  His Trump University is currently facing a class action which exposes it as a major scam, designed to rip off anyone who signed up to its courses, peddling false prospectuses of what it offered and preying on the weak and poor in order to make its money.

The judge who has been handed this case happens to be an Hispanic judge, whom Trump consistently tweets about as being biased against him, impugning his judicial integrity.  He also refers to the East Chicago born judge as "Mexican" in his statements, and he made much of the judge's "Mexican" race when he spoke to a crowd at one of his rallies.  Saletan again:

Trump’s attack on Friday continued in this vein. “I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump,” he told a crowd in San Diego. “His name is”— at this point, Trump, having raised his voice like a drum roll, held up a piece of paper and pronounced the name carefully, gesturing for effect—“Gonzalo Curiel.” The audience booed, and Trump let the moment soak in, shaking his head in solidarity. Trump told the audience two things about Curiel: that he “was appointed by Barack Obama” and that he “happens to be, we believe, Mexican.” After railing against Curiel and the lawsuit for more than 10 minutes, Trump concluded: “The judges in this court system, federal court—they ought to look into Judge Curiel.”

Donald Trump isn't a joke.  He is the worst type of malevolent, minority-baiting demagogue whose relationship with the truth is so tendentious as to beg the question of whether he even understands the concept.  He is a man who incites violence at his rallies and stoops to slews of personal insults against his opponents in the absence of any thought-through policies.

The British politician Edmund Burke famously noted, back in the late eighteenth century when all Europe was abuzz with the daily news of slaughter in the French Revolution, that "all that is required for evil men to triumph is that good men stay silent".  I might demur about whether all of the Republicans who are rolling over in front of Trump are necessarily good men, but they are fantastically not just keeping silent, they have chosen to add their voices to the evil in their midst.

Donald Trump is riding high at the moment as his likely opponent in the autumn election is mired in her own primary battle.  But if and when Hillary Clinton does win nomination as the Democratic candidate, then all those Bernie supporters, and Bernie himself, need to take a long hard look at her opponent.  For all her flaws, Hillary is not a racist, and nor does she approach Trump's levels of deception and wanton bigotry.  If Sanders supporters think that somehow it's ok to stay home when Hillary faces Donald, that their own purity shouldn't bring them to vote for a seasoned candidate because she has compromised too much, well then they too can count themselves in the legion of Burke's silent good men (and women), who wilfully allowed a man who will tarnish their democracy to be elected president.  There are no innocent voters in this contest.

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Donald Trump's startling success in the current Republican primaries is starting to hit home and spark a tranche of "we could have a president Trump" articles.  None of them make for happy reading and they're not intended to.  Trump is the horror story that most liberal observers of politics - whether that be liberal-right or liberal-left - hoped they wouldn't have to witness.  Could it be that the "pax occidentalis" that has held since the end of the Second World War is about to come apart?

Trump is an easy to recognise trope of the populist nationalist variety.  He shares none of the internationalism of any of his post-war predecessors.  His candidature hearkens back to the days of Warren Harding, but with an added nastiness.  His victory would bring to the White House a man who is perfectly capable of bringing the old international, American protected consensus crashing down.  Anne Applebaum considers this disaster in her Washington Post column, and adds a potential Marine Le Pen presidency of France with a British exit from the EU to the mix, just for good measure.  It's a pretty depressing vision.

Comparisons with Hitler are over-used and inaccurate, but what is apposite is the comparison between the frustrated, politically dislocated electorate of Weimar Germany in 1933 and the current frustrated, politically dislocated electorate of America in 2016.  The Spectator's Freddy Gray has provided a fascinating and cogent analysis of both what it is that Trump is tapping into in America, and how it is likely to play out in America's world role (worth buying this week's edition for, an online preview is here).  Gray writes that  "an ever larger number of Americans feel angry at the system.  The Donald embodies their rage and multiplies it as in a hall of mirrors".  Yes.  Exactly.  That's what populist demagogues do, and when a nation feels uneasy about itself and its manifest destiny, an electorate can turn quite nasty.  Nasty electorates produce nasty leaders.

Gray is particularly good, later in his piece, at acknowledging the huge impact America has had on the nature of the post-war world, and the democratic security that western nations have rather taken for granted, even as much of the rest of the planet disintegrates into strife and savagery.  A president uncommitted to such a role is more concerning than we might think.  As Applebaum notes, Trump has little time for modest democratic politicians and their compromising, negotiated positions, but he does express admiration for Vladimir Putin.  Putin is arguably the most sinister and dangerous man to govern Russia since the late Josef Stalin.  He seems to combine similar levels of paranoia about the non-Russian world with an opaqueness that makes him impossible to read.  (He is, incidentally, superbly portrayed in Netflix series "House of Cards", as fictional Russian president Petrov.)

Of course, much of this is speculative.  Trump is not only not president, the odds are still against that possibility.  Marine Le Pen is not yet president of France and could suffer the same fate as her once popular father.  But electorates are not bound to elect moderate, reasonable men and women, and we may just have reached a time in the affairs of liberal nations when de Tocqueville's fear of democracy may prove wholly justified. 

Donald Trump's presence is already clear in Washington DC.  A couple of blocks down from the White House a large placard announces that Trump is coming here in 2016.  Whether or not his company's renovation of the old Post Office building into its latest hotel (with what will be "Washington's largest ballroom" - just right for an inaugural ball) is a sign of a more serious presence in the nation's federal capital is yet to be seen, but as South Carolina's primary enters its closing phase as I write, Trump is starting to look like an unstoppable force.

If New Hampshire proclaimed Trump's ability to transcend the largely hostile coverage from the mainstream media, and his clear political potency after having been seen initially as a national joke, then South Carolina could be the primary that makes him the almost unbeatable front-runner.  Trump as president is not looking quite such a remote prospect today.

Of course, this extraordinary and unpredictable race still has many curves to navigate, but Trump as stayer and possible victor is shaping up as a clear line in the primary sands.  Cruz is his closest runner, and that is one of the reasons South Carolina is so significant.  Win there, and Trump shows that he is more than capable of winning the evangelical vote on which Cruz's run so much depends.  Cruz's appeal is narrow compared to the more iconoclastic Trump. 

As for Rubio, as one MSNBC commentator noted today, coming 3rd., 5th., and 3rd does not constitute front-runner status.  He needs to win somewhere!

If South Carolina goes for Trump today, he may not need the swanky new hotel he's building.  There's a nice residence just down Pennsylvania Avenue just waiting for the New York billionaire to move in.

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We didn't understand America back in 1776 and we're not very good at it now.  If gun laws are clear evidence of that, the popularity of Sarah Palin is even better evidence.

The woman who did more than anyone else, apart from Barack Obama, to ruin John McCain's chances of the presidency in 2008 is back as a political cheerleader-cum-would-be-office-holder.  And for Donald Trump, possibly the nearest male equivalent to her own brand of populist, anti-establishment, celebrity-seeking, not always sense-making political showmanship.

Trump's campaign is still largely focussed on outmanouevring his closest and most sinister rival for the Republican nomination, Ted Cruz, a man hated equally by everyone who he works with, whether left or right.  And he's done it again.  Trump's original anti-Muslim comment was designed to outflank Cruz, and receiving the endorsement of Palin is another humdinger that must be rankling with the Texas senator.  (In fact, we know it does because a Cruz staffer had a go at Palin hours before her much anticipated endorsement of Trump, causing a minor twitterstorm generated by Bristol Palin who attacked Cruz back. It's all fun and games and mutual love in the Christian vote-seeking Republican camp).

Palin is still a crowd-puller amongst Tea Party conservatives and the fundamentalist Christian base which Cruz appeals to so much, as the Telegraph's David Lawlor shows in his rolling pieces on the Iowa meeting.  It speaks volumes about Republican grassroots' political sensibilities that she is.  After torpedoing the McCain bid in 2008 she promptly left elective politics, resigning as Governor of Alaska (from where you can see Russia, as she memorably reminded everyone when asked to give evidence of her foreign policy expertise) to pursue a more lucrative career as a media celebrity.  She must still rank as one of the most proudly stupid and ignorant people to ever seek elective office, and her rambling endorsement of Trump was filled again with her own string of bizarre and meaningless catch-phrases ("We're not gonna chill, we're gonna drill, baby, drill"; they're replacing the safety nets with hammocks"; and lots of "Doggone....").

But Palin has energised the Trump campaign as the Iowa vote approaches on Feb 1st., and if her endorsement swings enough of that mid-western state's conservative base towards the Donald such that he beats the hitherto-favourite Cruz, well then his bid for the eventual Republican nomination is looking stronger than anyone - including probably Donald himself - might have ever believed.

I love the Republican race.  I just don't want any of them to be president.

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Bless them.  MPs gathered in numbers not usually seen for debates to discuss the pressing issue of whether Donald Trump, who hasn't got any immediate plans to visit Britain, should be banned just in case he ever does.  As they earnestly debated the ins and outs of an essentially trivial petition, you almost felt that they believed America was watching and listening.  The full range of faux outrage was on display, with one MP dramatically declaring that Donald Trump had insulted her personally.

Oh dear.  Never mind the fact that this debate effectively took Trump at his own valuation.  Never mind that MPs were debating something they themselves couldn't actually affect (the power to ban is the Home Secretary's).  Never mind that there must have been 101 other ways for MPs to spend their time that might actually have had an impact on their constituents.  The key thing about this debate was the continued suffering British politicians have that somehow, in a mind somewhere across the Atlantic, Britain actually matters.

She doesn't, and hasn't since 1812 when British troops burned down the executive mansion in a sort of last hurrah.  The Americans repainted it and had a place they could now call the White House, which was nice.  But the feeling in Britain, ever since America started becoming the No 1 Nation, has long been that somehow we are tied together in a uniquely special relationship.  Alas, reality shows us a rather different picture, as a quick historical gander through the distinctly unspecial relationship will show.  Here are its principal lowlights, which I set out some time ago, when David Cameron was in the first throes of his infatuation with Barack Obama.

Roosevelt and Churchill.
This is where it was meant to have started. FDR moved heaven and earth to get US aid to brave little Britain, and he and Churchill bestrode the post-war world stage like conquering colossi joined at the hip. Yes?

Er, well not quite. Roosevelt was a thoroughly reluctant interventionist. He gave short shrift to the pro-interventionist Century Group, deferring instead to advisers like Sumner Welles, who in January 1940 was still determined to get Hitler and Mussolini to talk peace. When help did come, Roosevelt extracted everything he could from Britain and then tried to make sure the Atlantic War was firmly eastern focused, which suited American interests better. Neville Chamberlain had always believed that the cost of American help would be too high – he wasn’t wrong. Military bases, trading concessions and considerable regional influence was all ceded to the USA. The Roosevelt-Churchill relationship existed mainly in the mind of Churchill himself, who did so much to propagate it. Which is surprising, given the way FDR himself sought to undermine Churchill in front of Stalin at Yalta.

Truman and Attlee
Well, Attlee didn’t speak much anyway, but his Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin did, and it was Bevin who felt so downtrodden by Truman’s Secretary of State that he advocated British ownership of nuclear weapons, if only so that “no foreign secretary gets spoken to by an American Secretary of State like that again”. It was another Truman Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, who caustically remarked that “Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role”. Thanks for the support Dean.

Eisenhower

One word really. Suez. When Anthony Eden tried to protect British interests in the Suez Canal, Eisenhower was the first and most important statesman out of the blocks to condemn him. And then begin a run on the pound. Never mind that Khrushchev was slaughtering Hungarian rebels at the time – Britain was Enemy No. 1! Oh, and lest we forget, it was Eisenhower as US Supreme Commander who stymied Churchill and Montgomery’s plan to beat the Russians to Berlin. The Russians weren’t a threat you see.

Nixon and Heath
Possibly the only really effective working relationship between a US President and a British Prime minister, because it was based on an understanding that there wasn’t actually a Special Relationship at all. Both Heath and Nixon believed that America’s real focus in Europe was never going to be a single country, but a united European organization. Nixon, in any case, was very clearly identifying the East as the true arena for US activity.

Reagan and Thatcher
This is where it’s meant to really go into overdrive. If the lovebirds Maggie and Ron didn’t have a special relationship, then who did? But, alas, for all their cooing to each other in public, Reagan not only proved notoriously slow to throw support behind Britain in the Falklands crisis, but then didn’t let Thatcher know when he invaded the Commonwealth country of Grenada. Britain had to content herself by joining 108 other nations in condemning the invasion at the UN. Tellingly, Reagan later recollected than when Thatcher phoned him to say he shouldn’t go ahead, "She was very adamant and continued to insist that we cancel our landings on Grenada. I couldn't tell her that it had already begun." Special Relationship indeed.

Bush and Blair
No world leader was more determined to show his support for the US than Tony Blair. No other world leader was greeted familiarly as “Yo, Blair”. But for all the support he gave to George W. Bush’s strategy of middle east invasion, Blair’s voice was heard as tinnily as anyone else’s when it came to trying to influence US foreign policy. It was one of the supreme, defining failures of his premiership.