What can I add, as a historian, to all that is being said and written about POTUS 47 just now? He is entirely sui generis. There are no close precedents for him in the past, at least among US presidents, and probably among leaders of any other country – although I shouldn’t be surprised if ancient Rome provides a few. (And of course POTUS 45. And some Mafia bosses?) – But maybe that’s the important historical point to make: that Trump is an entirely new phenomenon. No-one quite like him has been seen in the White House before.

But there’s also an alternative historical reading – my own idiosyncratic one, as it happens. This is that he represents the climax of an underlying historical trend in America – underlying, that is, its presidential history; which trend is the progress of capitalism, a.k.a. ‘freedom’, from the very beginnings of the Republic, to its final(?) crisis today. Other Presidents have gone along with this trend, notably Ronald Reagan; but none has represented, even personified, the chaotic ending of it, in a kind of ludicrous quasi-fascism, as faithfully as Trump does; unfettered as he is by the constraints that the American constitution was supposed to impose on its Presidents.

Ah, Shakespeare! Thou shouldst be living at this hour! Here we have a wonderful tragi-comic hero for you – powerful, but immensely flawed, ignorant, narcissistic, revengeful and childish: all of which would surely be grist to your mill. A combination of Richard III, Falstaff and Othello, perhaps? (Although Shakespeare might not get the ‘crisis of capitalism’ bit.)

Even without the Bard’s help, I have to say that I’m enjoying the drama that is coming out of America today. – Albeit not without some schadenfreude; but combined with genuine sympathy for my American friends.