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Goodbye, America. Don’t be too sad – you had a pretty good run.

It was 242 years ago this summer you kicked us Brits out and declared your independence with the fine words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

And now it’s all over for your republic. I thought I’d become immune to Trump now.

I still watch, of course, slack-jawed like everyone else as he careers from disaster to disaster, from gaffe to rant to obstruction of justice.

But last week I watched, stunned afresh, as Trump made his State of the Union address (his original invitations were misspelled, of course, like his tweets, and invited people to his “state of the uniom” address), where he officially declared his intention to turn America into an autocracy.

(Image: REUTERS)

These were the words (slipped casually into the nonsense of his dull speech, which he delivered with all the enthusiasm and skill of an eight-year-old being forced to read Jane Austen) that caused my stomach to churn: “Tonight I call on Congress to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good workers – and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people.”

By “cabinet secretaries”, Trump means “loyalists directly under my control”. By “federal employees”, he means “FBI agents who displease me by investigating my crimes”. By “fail the American people”, he means “fail me”. And “fail me” means “disagree with me”.

Trump has asked for the extraordinary power to function as a dictator and to fire government employees as he sees fit. And the Republican Party stood up and applauded him saying it.

(Image: Getty Images North America)

Trump’s appealing to Congress might have struck you as odd if you had followed another breaking news story that day.

Last year, Congress and the Senate unanimously approved sanctions against Russia as punishment for interfering in the 2016 election. (How unanimous was the vote? Just five out of 535 members of the House or Senate voted against it.) The final deadline for implementing the sanctions was last Monday.

Just minutes before the deadline was due to expire at midnight, the Trump administration announced that they would not, after all, be implementing the sanctions voted for by the elected representatives of the American people. Their reason? Oh, something along the lines that Russia had probably already been punished enough.

Here it was – final proof that Trump will do whatever he likes without regard for democracy.

And a terrible, sinking feeling came over me, something I had not fully acknowledged over the last terrible year of Trump. The much-vaunted system of “checks and balances” of American politics only functions when the people within the systems adhere to some notion of decency and fair play.

(Image: AFP)

We all knew that Trump cares nothing about these things but the breathtaking brazenness of the last week has shown just how little he cares. So Trump is going to get away with it. All of it.

He will succeed in derailing Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. (And, even if he doesn’t, he will use the right-wing media to denounce any negative findings by Mueller as being politically motivated – and a significant percentage of the electorate will believe him.)

Russia will interfere again in this year’s mid-term elections and Trump will allow them to do so.

The Republicans will continue to gerrymander voting districts to their advantage. And Trump will most likely get reelected for another four years in 2020.

And then, as though this horror wasn’t enough, like any dictator he will begin preparations for his succession, for his children to take power, most likely his daughter Ivanka. Eight years of Trump and then eight years of Ivanka would take us up to 2032…

What happens then? Well, there would be a tiny bit of good news – Trump will be 86 and hopefully either dead or senile (or, rather, “more senile”.) His elder sons, Eric and Don Jr, are both so stupid they can barely open a tin of beans. So we definitely shouldn’t count them out of following daddy’s footsteps all the way to the presidency. Melania can’t run for president as she is not a US-born citizen. (Besides, she will 100 per cent have divorced Trump the second he leaves the Oval Office.) Who does this leave us with? Barron.

Barron Trump will be 25 in 2032. Could America possibly cope with an entitled rich kid not long out of his teens running the country? Why not? They’ve shown they’re prepared to put up with almost anything else.

“Democracy dies in darkness,” runs the slogan of Trump’s arch-enemy The Washington Post. But it also dies in the light. In the bright lights of the US Congress. Goodbye, America. Long live the Trumpocracy…