This crackpot election would be funny if it weren't sinister

IF THE 2024 presidential election was a television series we would say it had jumped the shark by now — reached the point of such incredulity as to have lost the plot.

- Sarah Baxter

The characters are all at each other’s throats. Donald Trump is behaving like a spoilt mean girl, posting “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” on social media, while a crazed gunman is lurking for 12 hours with an AK-47 in the bushes at his Florida golf club, hoping to succeed where an earlier would-be assassin had failed. Switching gears, Trump goes into full Churchillian mode and thunders: “I will NEVER SURRENDER!”

This is a crackpot election. With the outcome uncertain, it would be funny if it were not so sinister. Didn’t Trump’s friend, Tucker Carlson, recently declare that Winston Churchill was no big deal anyway? Carlson, who gave a prime time speech at the Republican convention, proudly interviewed a historian on his internet show who claimed Britain’s greatest statesman was a bigger “villain” than Hitler and touted the world’s weirdest excuse for the Holocaust, that the Nazis killed millions of Jews because they lacked the resources to care for them properly.

Trump is a chaos agent in a world filled with accelerants of his own worst instincts. Take Laura Loomer, the gal pal who has been jetting about on his private plane in Melania’s very obvious absence. Loomer flew with Trump to a commemoration of 9/11 at Ground Zero, despite calling the World Trade Center attacks an “inside job”. In 2022 she was filmed with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, toasting the “hostile takeover of the Republican party”. Then, she was trying and failing to win a Republican primary for a seat in Congress for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago district in Florida. Now that the former president has rall ied to her defence and applauded her “free spirit”, who knows what her next move will be?