Believing Barack Obama would comfortably win the 2008 US presidential election, some friends and I went to Chicago that November for the results.

We ended up being amongst the crowd of thousands in Grant Park as the president-elect gave his victory speech.

It was wonderful to witness what looked like such an important moment in American history, as the nation seemed to have turned a corner for the better by electing its first African-American president.

Eight years later, the hopes of 2008 had vanished. The most unqualified and unprincipled person imaginable succeeded Obama.

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As with Hitler in 1920s Germany, many considered Trump’s foray into a politics a joke when he descended his golden escalator in 2015. He was not taken seriously by opponents in the Republican Party and elsewhere until it was too late.

Both Hitler and Trump ascended to power using outrageous and divisive language, deploying ‘them v us’ tactics, while claiming that they, as outsiders of the elites, were the only ones who could fix the real or imagined malaise that existed in their nations.

While the checks and balances of the American constitution somewhat curbed Trump’s authoritarian instincts during his first term, it laid the foundations for him to destroy the constitution in his second.

A case in point is his filling of the US Supreme Court with malleable judges, who, in one of the most shocking judgments in the court’s long history, ruled in........

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