Can it be only last year that I was making the out-of-touch liberal elite laugh, in publicly subsidised theatres throughout pre-Brexit Britain, by saying that “Donald Trump” sounded like the kind of name Walt Disney would come up with if he was asked to invent a fart that could speak?

Happy times.

It seemed then that Donald Trump was destined to become little more than the answer to a pub trivia question, fondly and foolishly remembered, and filed alongside Faith Brown’s Rusty Lee impression, Spike Milligan’s sitcom Curry & Chips, and an almost heroically offensive sentence my dad shouted at a woman on a gangplank near Greenwich in 1997 as an example of the dying light of a distant dark age.

And can it be only last year that Brexit’s bogus cheerleader Boris Johnson, who remains incomprehensibly at large like a clever piglet, was reassuring us that we could leave the EU and stay in the single market, as his policy was “having cake and eating it”? Where is your cake now, fatty? Or, as Pliny the Younger might have said, “Ubi nunc est subcinericius panis, sterculus?”

And can it be only two days ago that a cakeless Theresa May, desperate to proffer illusory options before forcing through article 50 with the compliance of an immolated opposition, went lamb-like into the Playboy-encrusted office of Donald Trump? Friendless in Europe, she began trade negotiations with the kind of rogue state we might once have proudly imposed sanctions on. We didn’t buy Apartheid oranges. Henceforth let us boycott Dunkin’ Donuts, hardcore pornography and Adam Sandler movies, America’s most choice exports.

Article 50 was not designed to be triggered; nuclear weapons were not built to be used (which is lucky for us, because ours don’t work); and postwar western democracies weren’t supposed to vomit up people like Donald Trump, who appears to have reignited a war against the Native Americans, a conflict historians might reasonably have assumed was now settled. Things have learned to walk that ought to crawl.

Frightened Mexican peasants bow to Eldorado as he rides past, then spits on them from above

Events defy analysis. Sometimes it simply isn’t enough to just keep on drawing Nazi moustaches on Donald Trump’s face – by which I mean on pictures of Donald Trump’s face. Not his actual face. If you so much as approached Trump’s face with a marker pen you would soon be wrestled to the ground by the rubber-hands of his bodyguard, and then waterboarded until you agreed to disputed inauguration audience figures. To analyse Donald Trump we need better tools than felt tips. It seems to me that prophecies of Donald Trump have been built into the culture, perhaps by the very alien scientists that seeded us on Earth in the first place.

Before I seek Donald Trump in cinema, I am aware that my film buff credentials are in doubt. In last week’s column, I ignorantly mixed up two Dirty Harry movies. To be fair, it has been a hard month for fans of Clint Eastwood, whose endorsement of Donald Trump has finally meant we must face the fact that the violent reactionary characters our hero portrayed in the 1970s were not intended as satires of violent reactionary attitudes, but as blueprints for a dystopian future.

Indeed, I am now wondering if Eastwood’s touching portrayal of a weird loner’s dysfunctional relationship with a servile orangutan in the haunting visual poem Every Which Way But Loose (1978) was actually intended as a misogynist endorsement of traditional marriage.

Fans of fake news will be pleased to know that my Dirty Harry error has been erased from history on the Observer’s website. As regular readers will know, the only films I have really watched these past few years are Italian “spaghetti” westerns of the 60s and 70s. I have now seen 112, and sheer weight of numbers makes it seem like spaghetti westerns make sense of every human problem. Like Donald Trump’s tweets, they are often tasteless, incoherent and badly written, and yet somehow seem to offer exactly the answers people need.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

Last weekend I sat up late alone, eating some nuts, and watched Joe D’Amato’s micro-budget 1972 shambles Pokerface, a spaghetti that’s hard to recommend, even to genre stalwarts. Variously also known as Run Men Run, Trinity in Eldorado, Stay Away from Trinity When He Comes to Eldorado, Run Men Eldorado Is Coming to Trinity, and, rather brilliantly, Go Away! Trinity Has Arrived in Eldorado, the movie’s very titles, like spellings of Theresa May’s name, are post-factual, alternative names telling alternative truths. The same shot of a laughing Mexican eating something outdoors is repeated over and over again, at different points in the film, to fill empty space. The movie itself lies. The images cannot be trusted.

Pokerface stars Stelvio Rosi, last heard of as the line producer of the 1997 Ice Cube/giant snake vehicle Anaconda, as a magician-cum-conman involved in a series of unfunny scrapes in a blandly anonymous borderland. But just as I was getting ready to hit the hay, the last third of the film changed gear, and loomed like a warning from history.

Rosi arrives in a deserted, whitewashed town, ruled over by an eccentric gold-hoarding demagogue named Eldorado (Craig Hill), who rides around on an ostentatiously decorated nag, in a general’s uniform one suspects he is not entitled to wear. Frightened Mexican peasants bow to Eldorado as he rides past, and then he spits theatrically upon them from above. His garish throne is flanked by semi-naked women, instructed to laugh at his jokes and applaud his thoughts. He cries out, “My gold, my beautiful gold!” and is easily distracted by nudity and card tricks. It’s 2am, I am full of nuts, future sexploitation director D’Amato’s broad-brushed caricature of crazed power is Donald Trump, made flesh in a cheap 70s western, and I claim my £5.

But were D’Amato’s sticky fingers guided by a godlike power, warning us of our future? There are more antecedents for Trump, as if some unseen hand had threaded cautionary archetypes into our collective consciousness, perhaps the finest being the Golem of Jewish folklore. The rabbi of medieval Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, conjures a compliant monster to defend the ghetto. But he forgets to remove from its mouth the rune that brought it to life, and the Golem begins an indiscriminate rampage.

Some critics believe the story to be a 19th-century German literary invention. Fake news, folks! Fake news!! But little America has unleashed a monster of its own making, which it thought would do its bidding, and now no one knows how to bring it to a halt. Somehow I don’t think Theresa May is about to put it back in its box.

Stewart Lee’s Content Provider is now touring, see stewartlee.co.uk for details