Inside Out | Donald Trump as US president again would be the stuff of nightmares

For three years, I hoped the day would never come when I would be forced to consider what The Washington Post last month called the “chillingly plausible chains of potential actions and reactions” from Donald Trump’s return as US president.

With still a year to go, polls are suggesting that the presidential election will be a rerun of the 2020 battle between Trump and Joe Biden – except Trump might win. This is the stuff of nightmares.

Hillary Clinton said on a TV show that a Trump victory “would be the end of our country as we know it”. As a sore loser from 2016, she might be expected to say this, but more dispassionate figures voice similar concern. Harvard professor and former assistant defence secretary Joseph Nye wrote earlier this year that, if Trump succeeded, “the only predictable future of US foreign policy will be unpredictability”.

When Trump was elected in 2016, he was arguably an unknown quantity, with many confident that his “propensity for hyperbole and falsehoods”, as The Washington Post put it, would be held in check by the reality of high office.

Seven years later, and after one of the US’ most erratic presidencies, no one can suggest he is an unknown quantity. Trump’s track record tells it all. His megalomania, erratic vengefulness, manufactured claims of victimhood and pursuit of fact-free theatre thrive in plain sight – along with two impeachments, and 91 criminal charges in four separate trials, which together could involve hundreds of years behind bars.