Over the past few weeks, a random kaleidoscope of images has been flashing through my head. Some are characters from movies not seen since childhood. Others are snippets from literature or iconic art. What joins them all is an exaggerated, almost kitschy evil.

These images seem to be standing in for the real carnage my brain is trying to process: the bodies pulled from the rubble in Gaza, a school full of young pupils blown apart in Iran. The more than 1 million people in southern Lebanon expelled en masse from their homes. (Alex in the film of A Clockwork Orange appears, eyes clamped open as liquid is dripped into them, unable to blink away what is scorching his vision.)

What is so bewildering about the cruelty is how it has been allowed to pass, its casualness. Donald Trump hovers above the circus of death and chaos. (Billy, the clown-faced puppet in Saw, pops up rasping, “I want to play a game”.) Trump defies attempts to make his actions cohere with any particular strategy. His wars, killing of innocents, and indeed, the threatening of entire civilisations are reshaping the world, but without him even having orchestrated some master plan. He is animated by little more than momentary impulses and resentments.

Trump’s seeming lack of vision or ideology are misread as attributes that make him somehow less dangerous than the authoritarians of the past who have become the template for what evil looks like. Take the debate over whether Trump can be described as “fascist”. “You can’t be a fascist,” said the Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim, “without in any way meaning to be one.” Trump is........

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