Last week, Donald Trump was addressing a campaign rally in New York state at Syracuse. He told his audience that the current attorney general for New York state, Letitia James, who has held office as the state’s 67th attorney general since 2019 and who is black, was “disgusting” and a “dog”.

Should that kind of language surprise us? In another rally speech in Youngstown, Ohio, the week before, he urged Republican voters in the midterm elections to get out and vote to defeat the Democrats and “shove it up their ass”. Trump has resorted to using the F-word on his Truth Social website to threaten Iran with annihilation.

His bizarre attack on the Nobel committee for denying him the peace prize came in the same fortnight. Failure to make him the peace prize honoree was, he said at Syracuse, “an indelible stain on Norway”, a Nato ally of the United States. The decision was brought about by “radical ideologues who are anti-democracy and actually enemies of civilisation”. Trump ridiculously claimed again to have ended eight wars, telling his audience that he was about to “end or win” two more wars.

You may recall that a previous prize winner from Venezuela, María Corina Machado, former speaker of the Venezuelan national assembly and long-time critic of kidnapped president Nicolás Maduro (who is now........

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