When The Good Fight began, it did so with a famous opening scene: a closeup of Diane Lockhart watching the inauguration of President Trump. When I first saw it last February, I thought she looked to be in a state of despair – exasperated, even petulant, at what was unfolding in front of her eyes. But watching it again, just over a year later, I think that wasn’t quite right. To see it again now is to see her defiance. As Diane gets up to turn off the TV and leave her sofa, there is a strong sense that she is dusting herself down and getting on with the necessary job.

Judging by the season two premiere, the same can be said of the series itself. Given its ancestry, The Good Fight was unlikely to shy away from politics, and during its first season, it took The Good Wife’s winning formula of grafting real and very current affairs into its characters’ lives and work, with only the thinnest of fictional veneers. When Maia Rindell found herself unwillingly embroiled in her father’s Madoff-esque Ponzi scheme, an ex-boyfriend set out to ruin her life by flooding the internet with fake news about her. The social network ChumHum attempts to remove hate speech from its platforms, only to find that it’s impossible to put the cork back into the bottle. A doctor is taken to court for daring to save the life of a suspected terrorist. Trump was a background murmur for the entire season, with arguments between colleagues over who voted for him and why, and a growing sense of paranoia within the legal community over what might be seen as a partisan action.

Now, the Trump administration has been promoted to season regular. The credits have added a new chapter to the litany of images, as screens with Trump and Putin on them are added to the law books and whisky decanter and telephones that are exploded. Reports flash up: the president calling the press “the enemy of the people”, white supremacists marching as he talks of “very fine people on both sides”, denials of collusion. For a show that takes its cues from current affairs, these are certainly rich pickings, and at times, it feels as if the writers are barely bothering to pretend to fictionalise any more.

Barbara Kolstad’s dramatic eulogy for Carl Reddick rails against greed and a pervasive lack of ethics and principles and mentions Nazis taking to the streets. The Obamas are off-screen characters in the Reddick-Boseman drama, with their patronage crucial to keeping the firm afloat. The fictional Barack and Michelle privately approve, so we’re told, of a tweet calling Trump a white supremacist, though it leads to its author (and Reddick’s daugher, and Boseman’s ex-wife) Liz Lawrence resigning from the Department of Justice, just before she’s pushed. One of the show’s real strengths is making the corporate shuffling of Chicago’s legal firms into thriller-worthy stuff, and Liz’s potential entrance into the private sector adds more fuel to that already combustible fire.

Cush Jumbo, Rose Leslie and Christine Baranski. Photograph: CBS

What’s absolutely clear this time is that nothing can be taken for granted, and that everything is open to manipulation. When Jane Lynch’s comically persistent FBI agent stalks Maia around a funeral in order to get her to give up her father’s location, she produces a recording of a phone call, entirely faked, to suggest he lied about having another family. Lucca is the first to doubt its veracity, but it’s investigator Jay who explains the technology – a 40-minute recording of any voice is enough to create a fabricated conversation. “Our brave new world,” he says. “Mistrust anything.” Inevitably, the spectre of populism is at play too. A divorce lawyer is murdered by a client, who screams “Kill all lawyers” into the reporters’ cameras as he is arrested. “Can overbilling get you killed?” asks the anchor, and the audience is left to wonder if the perpetrator is about to have his Howard Beale moment. I’m sure it will not be a one-off.

As if to hammer home the fact that the ground is shifting underneath everyone, at all times, we are taken back to Diane Lockhart, who concludes a busy few hours of hustling by microdosing psilocybin in order to gain a spot of perspective. We always knew that Diane loved a drink, of course, but it did come as some surprise that she took the barman’s advice and decided to see out the day with a mild dose of hallucinogen, staring wondrously into the cosmos. A brave new world, indeed.