Anyone seeking fictional forewarning of the dystopic nightmare of a second Trump administration might consider the 1979 film Being There, in which a simpleton savant inveigles his way into the confidence of the US President.

Expertly acted by Peter Sellers in what turned out to be his last film Chance, the idiot gardener of a rich industrialist, is mistaken for prescient political sage, Chauncey Gardiner, whose homespun, platitudinous aphorisms about the growth of plants and the passage of the seasons are used as the intellectual underpinning of American policy.

As the president comes to the end of his second term in office, the hapless Chauncey is seen as a natural successor.

Of you might look to Phillip Roth’s novel, The Plot Against America, which imagines an alternative history in which Franklin D Roosevelt is ousted from office in 1940 by a populist, xenophobe celebrity, Charles Lindbergh.

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Told from the perspective of a New York Jewish family, Lindbergh’s rabidly isolationist administration oversees a gradual descent of American culture from folksy antisemitism to full-blown pogroms and massacres against Jews.

Of course, fiction never fully reflects reality and so, depending on your point of view, Trump is either a bad Chauncey Gardiner or a pro-Israeli........

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