IT IS usually a sure sign of political idiocy to believe the crudest caricatures of political stances, especially when they embrace all supporters of a given party or cause. The idea that every supporter of a given group actively wants to do down a particular section of the population is normally childish, unless it’s applied to expressly racist parties like the National Front of the 1970s, or to their counterparts on the extreme Left, such as fringe groups like Class War.

Most versions of the Labour party, such as John Smith’s, Tony Blair’s, or Sir Kier Starmer’s, are neither crypto-Tories (as critics on the Left claim) nor quasi-Marxists, as the Right likes to imagine. Tories do not want to crush the poor, even if some of them show little understanding of them, and if they have a secret plan to sell the NHS to Big Pharma (they don’t), they’ve done nothing about it despite decades in charge. If nationalists misrepresent or obsess about the case for independence, it’s because they see it in a rosy light, and view most problems through its lens, not because it’s an intrinsically ridiculous idea. And while some politicians may be self-serving or incompetent, few actually intend to make matters worse, even if you think that will be the result of their policies.

All of this is a prelude to marking the closing days of an extraordinary exception to this rule. Donald Trump, going into his final fortnight as president, has proved to be not only as dreadful as his opponents, his character and his previous track record all predicted, but – mirabile dictu – worse.

Anyone at all aware of Mr Trump since he popped up in the mid-1980s as a real-life incarnation of Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street (and as the idol of the titular character in the novel American Psycho) could already easily believe that he was a vainglorious, self-serving braggart, nowhere near as successful as he claimed, and probably treated women appallingly. The judgment that he was an unsuitable sort of person to gain the Presidential nomination wasn’t difficult to make; indeed, a great many prominent figures in the party whose nomination he sought made it.

What came as a surprise was just how blatantly Mr Trump would use the post to bring revenue into his own business enterprises, shamelessly appoint unqualified members of his family to important posts, and pursue petty vendettas. Two other things astonished more than anything else: his readiness totally to ignore or contradict obvious facts, and the fact that so many Republicans were prepared to go along with him in arguing that black was white.

Trump’s distortion of fact was not like most disputed political statements. Claims that Jeremy Corbyn’s nationalisation plans were affordable, or that Brexit would put £350 million a week back in Britain’s pockets, or that Scotland actually subsidises England are all highly contentious, but people have tried making those cases without drifting into outright fantasy. That is what politicians do. Even if the basis is very flimsy, there’s usually some excuse for one.

What they don’t, on the whole, do is claim, with no evidence at all, that something that everyone can see doesn’t exist (like a new wall along the Mexican border, of which just 15 miles were constructed) does. Or that something that everyone can see does exist (like Joe Biden’s share of the vote) doesn’t.

Mr Trump was quite capable of denying he’d said something that he’d said 30 seconds earlier, and that you could rewind the interview to watch him saying. Claims by some observers that his behaviour indicated serious mental incompetence (as well as narcissistic personality disorder) had no medical imprimatur, but – unlike the president’s deranged Twitter pronouncements – seemed quite plausible.

There are two conclusions that many drew from Mr Trump’s lies and his party’s readiness to back them. One is that American politics has been irreparably damaged by his “fake news” agenda; the other is that the Republic Party has been.

In the case of the former, Mr Trump may be more a symptom than a cause; he may also be – in fact, almost certainly is – extremely unusual. He’s the first president with no qualifications of any kind in military or public life: undoubtedly his appeal to many supporters. Mr Trump, though he clearly lost the election, got an awful lot of votes by reaching people who wouldn’t otherwise have voted.

It may be depressing, and baffling, that almost half the population could vote for him, but it doesn’t help to write them off as morons. Despite his evident failings, Mr Trump did a few popular things. He didn’t go to war: the rest of the world may often see the US as a bossy “world policeman”, but many Americans are isolationist. He set up protectionist tariffs, a stupid idea, but one domestic interests often like. The economy, until Covid, was doing fairly well. And he opposed identity politics, where the Democrats are quite left-wing (as opposed to economics, where they certainly aren’t), at least by US standards.

Trump supporters may have “priced in” the ghastliness of his character because, paradoxically, reality TV is clearly just an act. That doesn’t suggest anyone else would have the same chance of gaining their support. If his base is people voting against all politicians, that’s not easy for other candidates to replicate.

The digital age may aid the spread of misinformation, but also the ability swiftly to correct it. It’s likely that “fake news” will settle down, and it’s unlikely any other candidate would or could employ it as blatantly as Mr Trump. So America’s polity can recover, and if politics goes back to being roughly as it was pre-Trump, that’s the probable outcome.

But Mr Trump may very well have destroyed the Republican Party. His acolytes within it are now entirely discredited with political realists – indeed, anyone who is not in tinfoil hat territory. Yet while they have made themselves unelectable by normal standards, they have not Trump’s outsider status or uniquely brazen, if appalling, qualities. The question is whether they can now disown this period and rebuild themselves as a credible force. There are few signs of it.

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