Much of Trump’s appeal can be explained by the fact that the modern American left has become so ghastly. Weaponised by social media, political correctness and identity politics have evolved from niche attitudes into powerful vehicles for censorship, moral bullying and intimidation. Anyone who does not conform to social values deemed acceptable is marginalised and “cancelled”.

The ghost of George Orwell haunts the country’s college campuses, as prestigious American universities have degenerated from havens for free thinking to licensors of orthodoxy.

No wonder that Trump, as the left’s most despised hate-figure, is a hero not just to his evangelists, but has remained popular with so much of middle America. On other familiar conservative causes, too, including abortion, gun ownership, border control and taxation, Trump is an effective champion.

But Trump is not a conservative. A right-wing demagogue he may be. The most scornful and effective scourge of the condescending and censorious liberal elite, he surely is. But that alone is no excuse for conservatives to turn a blind eye to the threat Trump poses to values which they have always considered sacrosanct.

Those values include respect for constitutional government. A failed candidate who stubbornly refused to accept the outcome of an election, encouraged his supporters to disrupt the proceedings of Congress to prevent the result being declared, and propagated without a shred of evidence the fantasy that the election had been stolen, is no conservative.

Loading

Nor is a person who is openly defiant of both the criminal and civil law, and seeks, in a similarly mendacious way, to discredit the US justice system as a political conspiracy against him. (Perhaps the motivation of some of the prosecuting authorities may be questionable. But all of them?) Nor is someone who openly countenances a “revenge presidency”, with all the abuse of executive power that threatens, a person conservatives should find acceptable.

It is, however, in foreign policy that Trump is most radically at variance with the honourable traditions of American conservatism. (Not for nothing did Biden, in his State of the Union speech, evoke the memory of Ronald Reagan.)

Trump’s insouciant remarks about encouraging Russian aggression against NATO (of which America is the principal security guarantor); his refusal to criticise the killing of Alexei Navalny; his indulgent attitude to Vladimir Putin; the near certainty that, if elected, Trump would pull the rug from under Volodymyr Zelensky, and thus retrospectively endorse the worst violation of international law since World War II, are the most dangerous, and revealing, telltale signs about Trump.

Yet, he is merely channelling what the Republican Party has become, some of whose loopier members buy Putin’s line about the decadence of the West, and seem to prefer his style of authoritarian government to Western liberal democracy.

In a thoughtful contribution to The Spectator last week, Tony Abbott expressed his alarm at how many Trump Republicans seem mesmerised by admiration for Putin, whom he rightly described as “pretty close to evil”.

No enemies on the right? For principled conservatives, who believe in constitutional government, liberal democracy, respect for the rule of law, and a foreign policy which stands up to aggressors and autocrats, there certainly can be. Those enemies include the demagogues who threaten those values. Donald Trump is one of them.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general.