His idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.

And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness. There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.

Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.

Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege. And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things: a bully.

That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all.

He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – losers, he calls them - and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think... ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ ...is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

1) Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are. 2) You don’t need to be Columbo to spot a few flaws in the man. This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too: his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.

After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit.

His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.

He makes Nixon look trustworthy, and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump. And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:

‘My God… what… have… I… created?’ If being a twat were a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.

Bring back Jan Smit, starting thursday!! #eurovision

Bring back Jan Smit, starting this Thursday! #eurovision2024

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Jeff Bezos never wanted this cartoon to become public. He killed it, and as a result, pulitzer prize editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit. Make sure everyone sees this cartoon.

Spineless, yellow-bellied, lily-livered, weak-kneed, pusillanimous chickenshits.

The USA is turning into Shadar Logoth.

He is not boiling the frog, he’s microwaving it