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If anyone understands what it feels like to be Donald Trump, it’s the six-year-old boy who takes his Lego airplane, holds it high above his Lego village, and smashes it straight into each one of his Lego houses and storefronts and mutant pirate ships while his friends egg him on.

Over a single week, the Republican presidential candidate encouraged a hostile government to spy on his opponent, refused to release the tax returns that might (we hope) prove he’s not at the mercy of this same hostile government, and gave a major speech befitting a 16th-century monarch with an advanced case of syphilis – all while some 45 per cent of his fellow Americans egged him on.

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The rest despair. “He’s a madman, but nothing matters to these people. They like him anyway.”

No. Trump’s madness matters – that’s the essential problem. His lunacy excites people, makes them crazy too, makes them like him more. Occasionally, when we feel very small, when we feel like powerless victims, we’ll take our power back by victimizing ourselves first, make ourselves our own biggest bully, and with every mad act of self-annihilation distract ourselves from the overwhelming fear that annihilation is out of our own control. And there’s nothing like a deranged autocrat to satiate a person’s desire for total destruction.