My hunch is that the Supreme Court will not be as Trump-friendly as Democrats fear. Nonetheless, it will never be seen as impartial. America’s highest court relinquished any claim to be a neutral arbiter in 2000, when its then conservative justices intervened to halt the Florida recount and effectively handed victory to the Republican George W. Bush.

The primary season has reminded us of other flaws in the US system, such as the counter-majoritarianism of the Electoral College. A small number of voters in a small number of states will decide the winner, which explains our recent focus on pockets of Muslim voters in Michigan angered over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza.

Though Biden will almost certainly win the nationwide popular vote, as Democratic candidates have done in seven of the past eight presidential contests, that will be irrelevant. Instead, the election will almost certainly be decided in just six key battleground states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

For years now, America has been giving dystopian literature a run for its money, and that’s been especially true of this primary season. There were echoes of Adolf Hitler when Trump warned that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the nation. Last month, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created during fertility treatments should be considered children, which cast doubts on the legality of IVF.

Conspiracy mongers saw in the Super Bowl a psychological operation involving the Pentagon, Taylor Swift, her boyfriend, the American football star Travis Kelce, and the entire NFL to help Biden secure four more years.

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Thankfully, there have also been signs of sanity. Nikki Haley, who has now dropped out of the race, won more than 30 per cent of the vote in the Republican primaries, raising hopes that an anti-Trump majority will assert itself in November. However, four major polls on the eve of Super Tuesday showed Trump leading Biden, and revealed the deep-rooted dissatisfaction with the 81-year-old incumbent over his age, the economy and the chaos at the US-Mexico border.

The rowdiness of the State of the Union address, with its partisan heckling, again showcased Washington’s dysfunction. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who came dressed in a Make America Great Again cap, looked more like she belonged in the studio audience of a Jerry Springer show. Alas, the spectacle of American democracy now resembles trashy daytime TV. Normal programming is a long way from being resumed.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of the forthcoming book, The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.