Encouraging scenes from the Republican national convention (RNC), where US politicians and the wider world are being told to dial down their rhetoric by a crowd of people rhythmically raising their right fists and screaming “fight, fight!” It’s just a hunch, but when historians come to assess the period we seem to be marching into, they’re not going to say that “metaphors” did it.

By way of an unnecessary recap, Donald Trump has survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania, and your jaw just had to drop at his extraordinary instincts. He was back on his feet within seconds, while Joe Biden’s campaign is suffering the PTSD.

And so to the convention in Milwaukee. One lesson of the past few years is that things can always get worse, so in many ways it feels inevitable that in terms of Trump’s familial support, we are very much in the “bring back Ivanka!” era. She’s Eleanor Roosevelt compared to the large adult sons. Like me, you probably relish being led in a chant of “drain the swamp” by someone who can’t even drain his gene pool. Stuff that should have been caught in the filter is now clearly in the ascendancy, with chinless blunder Don Jr reportedly the big advocate for his father picking Ohio senator JD Vance as his vice-presidential running mate. I’d assumed that fellow beardie Don Jr had alighted on Vance after Googling “Me if I was housebroken”, but he told reporters he’d done it because “I’d seen him on TV”. A sort of extreme-right version of managers buying players because they’ve seen them on Fifa.

Anyway: Vance. Who is he? Well, he once wrote a book that........

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