There was tremendous news for US liberals last week. We are not thinking of the creaky performance by Hillary Clinton on Roosevelt Island.
This was officially the opening gig of her tour, but Clinton has been preparing for so long that the performance came across like Neil Diamond reluctantly delivering Sweet Caroline to a crowd that won't tolerate new material.
She was doing that infuriating thing of pretending to recognise faces in the crowd. The rhetoric was so bland it made the fake blandness on Veep – a TV satire that fights to keep up with reality – sound like the work of Leon Trotsky.
“If you do your part, you ought to be able to get ahead. And when everybody does their part, America gets ahead too,” Clinton actually said. Look to the future! Because that’s what becomes of the present when it’s done being the past. See? I can do this too.
No, the really stirring intelligence for leftish American voters was the formal arrival of Donald Trump to the presidential race.
You could argue that Trump is not the most worrying individual to challenge for the Republican nomination in recent decades. Rick Santorum, all tank tops and intolerance, brought a trainspotter look to the last battle that still poisons the air. In contrast, Mike Huckabee’s avuncular persona seemed disturbingly at odds with social policies that would seem reactionary to the Westboro Baptist Church.
The distinction is that those fellows had an outside shot (well, well outside) of taking the nomination.
Prayers answered
Trump is, however, the very answer to Democratic prayers. He is a colourfully absurd, frantically eccentric, right-wing carnival huckster who, crucially, has no chance of becoming president. He’s just there to make the Republicans look bad.
And it’s not just that he wears flattened roadkill on his head and operates from a golden tower apparently decorated by the Borgias’ more flamboyant cousins. Get this: the man is an actual landlord.
Don’t get me wrong. Most citizens who rent out property are decent fellows who only occasionally twirl moustaches and very rarely wear black capes. But, in popular culture, the profession is inescapably associated with corporate malevolence.
Imagine you are a movie producer and I am pitching you a western. (You may have to also imagine this is 1957, but never mind that.) Who do you see as ideal for the humble farmer? Jimmy Stewart would do nicely. Henry Fonda would also be an acceptable choice.
Who will play the landowner who seeks to buy out the hero’s stake? Before I’ve got around to expanding on his character, you’re already casting Basil Rathbone in the role.
Consider It's A Wonderful Life. Frank Capra's film managed to make a hero of a banker – well, the proprietor of a building society, anyway – but it still had a landlord as its biggest villain. Donald Trump is a little more colourful than Henry Potter, but he has been no less rapacious in his business dealings.
Bandit capitalism
Moreover, his presence in the race reminds voters of a time when bandit capitalism was at its most unattractive. Trump gained greatest visibility when he appeared in the US version of
The Apprentice
in 2003, but for many of us he will always be associated with the vulgar acquisition culture of the 1980s.
It was then that he cemented his position as the person most likely to play the man on the front of the Monopoly box. Unlike Marxist cartoonists of the early 20th century, contemporary caricaturists no longer need to draw literal fat cats in morning suits when addressing inequality; they need only draw Donald Trump.
The Donald (as he is dispiritingly known to other holders of that excellent name) let nobody down when he appeared at Trump Tower on Tuesday.
As has become customary with Republicans, he emerged to a rock song by a liberal performer – Neil Young's Rockin' in the Free World – the real meaning of whose poisonously ironic lyrics were completely lost on the candidate.
He accused Mexico of “bringing their worst people” to the US. He is set to build a “great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall”. Somewhere up above, even Mr Potter is squirming uneasily.
Here’s the best news. All those candidates who remain in the top 10 in national polling will earn a place in a televised debate.
Competing candidates such as Jeb Bush and Scott Walker will be forced to treat this comical villain as some sort of equal, and the Republican brand will be concomitantly devalued.
There’s a message here for Democrats. If a pollster asks your opinion, then swear you’re voting for The Donald. You need to keep him in the top 10.