Amoral capitalist con-artists are a fairly common feature in literature – off-hand I can think of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), and HG Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) – and of course in historical reality: lots in the early 1900s, then Robert Maxwell, Sir Philip Green and scores of others in more recent times. A few of them achieve political influence and power, though that’s a phenomenon usually associated with post-Soviet Russia and post-colonial Africa. Now we have it in the USA. This documentary from 2000, which Trump apparently prevented from being broadcast at the time, fills in the commercial background to The Donald’s tricky rise. It’s all there – lies, fantasy, denials, amoralism, vanity: the lot. Hopefully it will be released for free-to-view TV shortly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/5pdw64/donald_trump_a_narcissistic_sociopath_2000_a

However the story develops from now on, it’s bound to be – if you’ll forgive the cliche – ‘stranger than fiction’. No-one would believe all this if it came out of Hollywood, or from a BBC satirist’s pen. By rights Trump’s hubris should end in nemesis. But none of us can see exactly how that can work out; unless my chilling New Year prediction – https://bernardjporter.com/2016/12/31/2017-prediction/ – comes true.