Defeat in the 2020 election only made him more dangerous and deranged. Not only did an American president incite an American insurrection to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Trump, the January 6 congressional inquiry was told, even expressed support for hanging Mike Pence, after his MAGA militia bayed for the vice-president’s lynching.

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That should have been the end of Trump. But six weeks later he was feted at a conservative conference in Florida that felt more like a cargo cult. A gold statue of Trump was even put on display, the kind of idolatry that fuelled his messiah complex. After the failed assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, Trump went mega-messiah. His narrow escape was proof that the Almighty, like Hulk Hogan, is in his corner.

Journalists, I realise, are generally not qualified to engage in psychiatric portraiture. But with Trump, his narcissism is self-evident. So, too, is the mounting signs of cognitive decline. Just witness his bizarre digressions, such as wondering out loud whether a shark or an electric engine poses the greater hazard in a mid-sea emergency or his riffs on “the late great Hannibal Lecter”.

Comparing his rally rants to speeches from 2017, experts canvassed by the health publication STAT observed he mixed up words more, used shorter sentences and was more digressive. What Trump has labelled “the weave”, his ability to embroider various random strands of thought, experts cite as evidence of speech patterns known as tangentiality, another sign of mental degradation.

Trump is not yet an American Caligula, the Roman emperor who, myth would have it, appointed his stallion as a senator. But his utterances are becoming weirder. Had Joe Biden’s decline not acted as a masking agent, the former president’s infirmity would have received greater attention.

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Even now that the 78-year-old is the old man in the race, the temptation is to write off his wackiness as the same old crazy, when actually we’ve reached the point of next-level crazy. Now he is not only banging on about wind farms but linking them to the soaring price of bacon. No amount of sanewashing can obscure the fact that the elevators in Trump Tower no longer appear to go to the top floor.

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

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