The danger is now clear: Trump is destroying democracy in broad daylight

This is not a normal election. I don’t say that because it is now clear that, against some stiff competition, Donald Trump is the most repellent individual ever to have sought, let alone won, the presidency of the United States. The latest proof comes in a quadruple-sourced account of Trump describing US troops who died for their country as “losers” and “suckers”, and demanding that a military parade exclude wounded veterans, lest spectators glimpse an amputee. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.

There was a time when the Atlantic’s jaw-dropping report, later corroborated “in its entirety” by the Associated Press, would have proved terminal for a politician in a country where respect for the military supposedly has the status of a religious obligation. But that time is long past. It ended in 2015 when Trump branded John McCain – who had spent more than five years in a Hanoi cell as a prisoner of war – a “loser”, though of course now Trump swears blind that he never said any such thing, despite the existence of video showing him saying exactly that.

In a normal election, you’d be running the numbers on the harm this would do to Trump among his avowedly patriotic base. But wiser heads have learned to give up on such calculations. Trump’s supporters will write this off as more fake news, and stick with their man even as he tramples on everything they claim to hold dear. Like he always said, he could shoot people on Fifth Avenue and they’d still vote for him.

Which is why it will similarly make no difference that this week he spouted conspiracist garbage about Joe Biden being controlled by people “in the dark shadows”, or reheated a Facebookspread fantasy about black-clad looters boarding planes to fly around the country causing trouble – think of it as RiotAir – offering no evidence. Of course that won’t move the needle.

Remember, this is a country where close to 200,000 people are dead