That old line that “politics is showbiz for ugly people” is so good it should be true, but it isn’t really. Politics has always been politics, and showbiz is something different. Not, however, in the unique case of Donald Trump. The current US president is best understood as a pomp-era megastar. Extraordinary, really, that Trump never even needed to get into cocaine. I think when he dies scientists will discover that his body naturally produced coke as a byproduct of digesting overcooked hamburgers.

Everything he says or does is redolent not of a politician, but an ego-driven entertainment industry behemoth. Monday afternoon in Egypt, with all the awkward world leaders box-stepping behind him, was very much The Official Release Party of a Peace Process. Ego can, of course, be very creative, so it should be widely acknowledged that this hold-your-breath settlement simply couldn’t have happened without our leading man.

In recent years you may have read whole screeds on “the Trump doctrine”, often written by former foreign ministers or revered diplomats, which singularly fail to capture the essence of the entity with which they are dealing. Maybe the reason they seem to have had so much trouble codifying things convincingly is that most of these people either regard showbiz as beneath them or know slightly less about it than they do about some obscure branch of theoretical chemistry. The muddle they get into is trying to compare and contrast Trump with Henry Kissinger or Benjamin Franklin or a pick-your-20th-century Euro-dictator, when it should obviously be Elizabeth Taylor or actual Taylor or turbo-monster-era Led Zeppelin.

The category mistake is even more perplexing because Trump makes his essential star-based ethos very clear. He speaks constantly about his ratings, releases the equivalent of political diss tracks twice a week, is pathologically allergic to anyone having more........

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