If he wins that contest, which begins in earnest in Iowa on 15 January, then polling in the handful of must-win, battleground states suggests he has a better than even chance of beating Joe Biden in November.

They will hand themselves the power to fire tens of thousands of civil servants, replacing them with yet more loyalists – eyeing up especially the intelligence and security agencies, rooting out anyone deemed unreliable.

With judicial independence cast aside, Trump would be able not only to pardon himself and his pals, but to order investigations into his enemies, starting with the Biden family and all those who, he believes, have wronged him – including, no doubt, those state election officials who refused to fiddle the numbers and declare him the winner of the 2020 contest.

One former high-ranking figure in the US military reckons that “the best we can hope for is that Europe pressures [Volodymyr] Zelenskiy into accepting some form of armistice with Russia that concedes Donbas and Crimea”, along with international security guarantees.

It’s worth spelling out what that means: a Moscow no longer deterred by the threat of Nato, rewarded for its aggression and free to pursue more elsewhere, eyeing up its neighbours and licking its lips.

If the US is led by a man who, we already know, grovels to dictators and disdains the US’s allies, other nations will start to recalculate: watch smaller, more vulnerable countries in Asia cosy up to Beijing, as a matter of self-preservation.

Saved 79% of original text.