What happens in the United States often feels more like a bad dream come true than the outcome of democratic politics.

If, say, 10 years ago someone suggested that a US president would one day sue the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion (€8.6 billion) and direct his own state lawyers to settle his suit by creating a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponisation” fund to compensate a political cohort which attempted to use violence to overturn a presidential election then the idea would have been dismissed as ludicrous fantasy.

If that settlement also entailed a lifelong immunity for the president and his family from tax liabilities, everyone would have laughed.

Yet that is precisely what has happened. So grotesque and unspeakable is this looting of the public purse that even Republican Party members of Congress are beginning to mutiny. Whether the mutiny comes to much remains unclear. Republicans seem capable of swallowing anything proposed by Donald Trump.

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