For a president famed for his shock value, the dog days of June have actually been some of the least shocking of his tenure. The break-up of Donald Trump and Elon Musk must have been on everyone’s bingo card. Surely no one was surprised when their divorce exploded on social media, and we feasted on a pass-the-popcorn moment writ large in Trump-scale signage.

US President Donald Trump addresses troops at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, this week. Credit: Alex Brandon/AP

A trope of the Trump years is that a Hollywood scriptwriter would be laughed out of town for authoring such a madcap screenplay. America is in its final season, goes the joke, and the showrunners have completely jumped the shark. On this occasion, however, they would have been sent back to the writing room, and told to try harder. The personal insults. The threats of cancelled government contracts. Even Musk’s taunt about the Jeffrey Epstein files felt cliched. I would not even have been surprised if either Trump or Musk had sought to monetise their row by launching a crypto coin in the shape of a broken heart. That is a measure of how, in the 10 years since Trump descended that golden escalator, the abnormal has been normalised.

The chaos in Los Angeles was also entirely foreseeable. A crackdown on protesters in a Democratic-run city in a Democratic-run state was always going to be an obvious Trump play. Better still, the faux flashpoint came when agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tried to arrest and expel unauthorised immigrants. For Trump, the staging for this American passion play could hardly have........

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