Hard as it may be to believe but it is less than six months since Donald Trump became leader of what we used to call the free world. Even harder to believe, or perhaps accept, is that - barring the unthinkable - the man many Americans continue to believe is God’s other son will remain in office until 2029. As I write, that is three years, seven months, sixteen days, twenty hours and fifty or so seconds from now. Assuming, of course, he doesn’t redraft the Constitution and stand again, Putin-like, for re-election.

Who knows what will happen in the meantime. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” is one of His Holiness’s mantras, and on that at least I’m prepared to take his word. Not content with catapulting the USA into chaos, he is doing a rather good job of creating the same mayhem across the globe. Every morning, it seems, we wake up to a new soundbite promising this, that or the next hair-raising thing. Who’d be surprised if, say, he decided tomorrow to annexe Australia or Austria or Azerbaijan?

All joshing aside, what we can say is that what we are witnessing is nothing less than the rapid erosion of American democracy. This is particularly apparent in the prominence given to oligarchs in positions of power in Washington. As always with Trump, this has not been done clandestinely but in the full, public glare. A man without shame, he has surrounded himself with what might best be described as the filthy rich.

Read more Rosemary Goring

In that regard, he started as he meant to go on. As Evan Osnos writes in his revelatory new book, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, Trump embraced the plutocracy on January 20, 2025, the........

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