An elective despotism, wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1785, “was not the government we fought for”. The great irony is that in the 250th anniversary of its foundation, this is what the United States has got. Today’s midterm elections could be a last chance to decide whether it’s what it wants.

Donald Trump was returned to the White House by people who knew exactly what he was like. There is no fool’s pardon for the majority who voted for him in 2024. The old saw – fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me – applies.

The corruption, the cruelty, the sexual predation, the frauds, the vulgarity, the egomania, the contempt for laws, institutions and truth, the environmental vandalism, the reverse Robin Hood economics of robbing the poor to give to the super rich, the coup-mongering when he lost the 2020 election – all of this was up in lights in his first term. And yet in 2024 he won fair and square.

If the antirevolutionary Tories of 1776 were still around, they’d be quivering with Schadenfreude: we told you so. US historian Gordon Wood, writing in Empire of Liberty, his great history of postrevolutionary United States, says that “in the 1770s the Revolutionaries had not conceived of the possibility of the people becoming tyrannical. When Tories had suggested in 1775 that the people might indeed abuse their power, good Whig patriots like John Adams had dismissed the notion as illogical: ‘a democratic despotism is a contradiction in terms’. The crown or executive authority was the only........

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