The spectacle of the odious Donald Trump and his family addressing the Republican National Convention this week reinforced the calamity that has befallen American politics. That the party of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower should have as its presidential nominee this bully, braggart and racist is a national embarrassment for the United States, far worse even than it is for the British to have Boris Johnson as our most senior diplomat.
The forces that propelled Mr Trump to the Republican nomination – belligerence, vacuous promise-making, xenophobia, racism – are all too present in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. They have contributed to the rise of the populist, anti-immigrant right in France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries. In Austria, the far-right candidate Norbert Hofer lost by only 31,000 votes in the presidential election in May; there will now be a rerun in October, because some votes were improperly counted. In the UK, the allure of populism resulted in a vote for Brexit on 23 June from which we are still reeling.
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