This column is being written early on Tuesday, hours before the US polls open, but I am “nauseously optimistic” about Kamala Harris, as Democrat campaigners like to put it.

The grounds for optimism have been there for a while. First the disproportionate numbers of women who registered to vote after the overturning of Roe v Wade – remember the midterm elections that exceeded Democratic hopes? Then the second influx after Harris’s declared candidacy, followed by the Trump campaign’s steady slide into darkness, as they gave up on the pretence of respecting women and focused on exciting the bile of young men.

On Sunday, a hunched, bored, low-energy Trump told a rally that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House at the end of his term – a hell of a confession from a man who has pleaded not guilty to charges of undertaking a “criminal scheme” to overturn the 2020 election results.

Whatever the outcome of the election, Trump’s legacy will take a generation to unravel. He will be described as unique. He isn’t. He is hardly the first world leader whose ego, popularity and demagoguery fattened in concert with a growing reputation for misogyny, money-grubbing, influence-buying and warping every kind of norm.

Here, in the enlightened EU, we had our own proto-Trump, Silvio Berlusconi, who 30 years ago began the first of four terms as prime minister of Italy though permanently entrenched in sleaze and sex scandals. He was a showman with a genius for victimisation, who demonised prosecutors as the judicial wing of his political........

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