For three hours, and in a relaxed mood, he harangued me about the stolen election and all the various bad people, dark forces, and disreputable agencies of government out to get him. This was rendered jauntily, even proudly. He clearly enjoyed the telling. This was his story.

The conversation led to dinner with him and Melania on the Mar-a-Lago terrace and the continuation of his catalogue of grievances, now broadcast to the long line of nightly well-wishers coming to his table. As I tried to leave, he held my arm for a few last-minute words about his unbelievable fortitude in the face of his enemies, adding: “What if they stormed in here to search the place? Mar-a-Lago! Here! Do you believe that’s possible? Well, I wouldn’t put it past them!”

When it did happen, earlier this week, the first word came from Trump himself on his social media network: “My beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.” He rushed out front as the narrator of events. This was his story, part of his him-against-everyone tale he had been telling for decades. Of course he was going to continue to own it.

Here again was not only his instinctual story sense, but the ratings rule he had learned in 14 years of reality television: the only thing that matters is conflict.

Since 2016, a grateful Republican party — otherwise muddled, out-of-touch, and hopelessly perplexed by its own angry voters — has adopted his vibrant script. And they eagerly took up its latest chapter. This was war. This was the deep state. This was the Gestapo. Even Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, a man who may despise Trump more than any other in his party, was forced, in the excitement of this new storyline, to take up the defence of the man whose political end he was spending much of his behind-the-scenes energy working to secure.

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Now, to be clear: this search, on the face of it, represented a relatively unimportant scuffle between a minor government agency, the National Archives, trying to enforce a point of principle, and the Trump team in Florida, likely more disorganised than it was intransigent. Of all the threats facing Trump — including a criminal investigation in Georgia over election interference; a criminal investigation in Washington that might encompass fraud, obstruction, conspiracy and sedition; and a civil case in New York which could bankrupt him (in which, this week, he plead the Fifth countless times) — this search might be the least of his problems. Little, and perhaps nothing at all, was really at stake beyond pride. And yet, by dint of his own narrative, the search of Mar-a-Lago now put the Justice Department in the crosshairs of Republican rage, gave Trump and his MAGA Republicans a fiery 2024 issue, and helped guarantee that he will run again and declare his intention soon.

The National Archive law spells out strict procedures for the retention of all executive branch documents and material. And all basically means all. It was well-known that Trump ignored or abused these procedures when he was in the White House, or at any rate refused to take the time, or few seconds of concentration, necessary to comprehend them. When he left, the national archivists found, with archivists’ great alarm, that lots of material from the Trump years had gone missing. Mar-a-Lago promptly returned 15 boxes. Nothing had been unpacked and, hence, it was simple to arrange a quick return trip. Of course, it was easy to imagine that lots more boxes were stored here and there on the Mar-a-Lago grounds. That’s what the Archive believed, and for nearly two years they have been negotiating to get their stuff back, only to be met with delays and indifference from Trump’s office. Finally, they took concerted action.

On Monday, when it all went down, this issue of proper record retention was suddenly joined in reports by the issue of classified material. The law prevents anyone, even with security clearance, from removing classified material from its prescribed place. People have gone to jail for this. This, then, was suddenly the charge that liberals were salivating over: Trump purloining national secrets and illegally stashing them at Mar-a-Lago — a jail sentence surely.

But among the complications here, which, by the week’s end, had become a leading and far from incorrect Right-wing talking point, is the unique relationship a president has with national secrets. A president can declassify secrets at will. Other than nuclear secrets, covered under a different specific statute, a president can declare any secret not secret. At several points in his presidency, aides and others feared Trump would do this inadvertently or, even, by mendacious design. Some saw it as his ultimate threat: if you corner me, I’ll tell all our secrets. Nor does there seem to be precise procedure for presidential declassification, although the Left-wing rushed to try to nail one down. If a president utters a secret, it’s declassified. Does a president, taking classified papers with him even in the last moments of his presidency — and Trump was often grabbing handfuls of papers and waving them about, or flushing them down the toilet — constitute declassification? At any rate, it’s a hard case.

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This search, therefore, might well be, as so many of the Democrats’ most aggressive legal thrusts against him turned out to be, just one more “nothing burger” — that Trump term of art signifying both liberal impotence and Trump’s Teflon coating. Or not. It remains both unclear what exactly was being looked for and unclear what was found, inadvertently, or otherwise. In theory, a federal judge would only have approved the raid because there was probable cause of a federal crime.

At any rate, you don’t search a once-and-possibly-future president without wanting to make a point. And you probably don’t search just for missing boxes. (It seems pretty likely that all presidents walk out with unintended boxes — former presidents move with the same jumble of stuff as the rest of us.) But was the point greater than showing — as the Right wing was charging — that the DOJ simply has the power to do this? Even various concerned liberals urged the DOJ to explain itself.

Here, though, was just one of the many continuing asynchronicities between Trump and the Democrats: Trump plays for daily short-term gain and popularity and is proudly transparent about it; the Democrats, seeing themselves as long term players, are often hopelessly opaque. Indeed, was the DOJ truly after something, or looking awfully out of it in the shadow of congress’s January 6 investigation, just under pressure to do… something? And was even a nothing-burger search something?

In the days after the search, there were rumours (Democratic rumours, of course) of a secret source at Mar-a-Lago directing the search not just to mishandled documents but to incriminating ones, a smoking gun related to his election plot or, even, nuclear secrets. This was credible — or at least not incredible — because Trump tends to command the opposite of loyalty even among his closest staff. Others described the search as characteristic of the ever-cautions Attorney General, Merrick Garland. He was testing the waters for an indictment and taking careful measures of the potential backlash. Or, already moving towards an indictment of the former president, he was softening up the public for it.

In traditional politics, a politician under this sort of siege would see among his supporters and even in his inner circle a certain winnowing of options. The outlook, everyone would understand, was grim. At best, you could only look to limit the damage. In most instances, the FBI showing up at your door would, alas, mean end of story.

But what has confused liberals for the whole of the Trump era is that almost every mortal legal arrow they have shot at him has had the opposite of its intended effect. They haven’t even hobbled him. They have only ever enlarged the Trump story, creating new options for him, more dedicated supporters, and an ever-grander battlefield.

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Most immediately, the FBI search — the “assault” in Trump terms — has become for Trump’s family, inner circle, and MAGA-aligned candidates, a prod to get him to declare his presidential run. It is the persistent state of even the closest Trumpers to know no more about what he will or won’t do or when than anyone else — “the king of optionality,” said one aide recently, with both admiration and annoyance.

Indeed, to their frustration, Trump has reverted to his long history of toying with presidential runs. Perhaps, most honestly, he has told various aides he wants to put off an announcement for as long as possible because he doesn’t want to work as hard as he’d have to with an immediate declaration. (Trump’s fundamental laziness has never received its rightful due as a political consideration.) But their futures are also on the line (and they are hungry for the money to start flowing). Plus, they are worried, in a way that Trump is not, about Florida’s upstart governor, Ron DeSantis, who has been climbing in the polls. In a way, the search is what they have been waiting for. Story-wise, “fuck you” is an irresistible element for Trump. Running, and running now, is the counterpunch from his Roy Cohn handbook.

The relentless push against him, from Mueller to Stormy Daniels, to impeachments one and two, has not only failed to bring him down, but continued to fuel the outrage of his mighty base. He is attacked, he responds — mostly in the kind of head-smacking asymmetrical fashion that confounds procedure-bound liberals and delights so many of his anarchic-leaning followers.

Then, with name-calling, counter-insults, and in the ensuing chaos, he declares that he has prevailed. Arguably, his stolen election plot line has bogged the story down — even he can’t figure out a credible way to declare victory. But shadowy forces in the government coming after him, and, at the same time, him daring them to as the big man standing in the Mar-a-Lago doorway… Well, that’s good. It’s the state against the individual. The Man against our man. It’s violating someone’s home! It’s nasty! Goddamnit, it’s civil war. Victory is him running again (pay no attention to whether he will win). And, as well, it’s all a very sweet money-raising pitch.

In the nearly eight years now since the Trump campaign began, neither the Democrats, nor that stubborn core of anti-Trump Republicans, have managed to find their own storyteller, or to recognise that the language, assumptions, and honour of politics may have changed. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, they have continued to act with the conceit that this is a country of laws not of men, no matter how many times this approach has disappointed them. In this, Merrick Garland, in his opaque, almost lugubrious, fair-mindedness and incrementalism, like Robert Mueller before him, seems to be a perfect representative. Politics is the business of lawyers and not of showmen, Democrats continue to believe that, and the law happens at its own pace without vulgar publicity. As the week went on, Garland, in evident frustration, was forced into a brief public justification for the search. Simultaneously, there were more or less official leaks that it might be “nuclear documents” the FBI was looking for.

Finally, the release of the actual search warrant spelled out some of the possible charges against him, including violating the Espionage Act (which is not spying or treason, though it sounds like it), giving liberals a sudden burst of the kind of hope they have harboured since the long-ago Russian investigation.

But while for others in the public eye an FBI search would be a great humiliation and fearful reckoning, when Trump returns to Palm Beach next month from his summer redoubt at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and greets club members on the Mar-a-Lago terrace, he will regale them with tales of this attack. He will tell them that this not only represents the end of the republic unless he protects it, but also the stuff of Trump legend — a story of his heroism and his opponents’ impotence.

“Let them come,” he said to me, as my visit ended, a little more than a year ago. “If they think they can get away with that. They probably think they can. How stupid can you get?”

When he was satisfied, Brooks walked over to the desk of Massachusetts’s Republican senator Charles Sumner, who was busy writing and barely even looked up. Between the two men there was no love lost. Brooks, who walked with a cane after having being injured in a youthful duel, was a passionate defender of slavery. Sumner, by contrast, was one of the nation’s most outspoken abolitionists. Only days earlier he had delivered a blistering speech mocking Brooks’s cousin, Senator Andrew Butler, as a hapless Don Quixote-style knight devoted to “the harlot, Slavery”.

To Brooks, the speech seemed an intolerable affront. At first he had considered challenging Sumner to a duel, but decided against it on the grounds that the Massachusetts politician was no gentleman. But he remained determined to take his revenge. And now, as Sumner glanced dismissively up, Brooks spoke. “Mr Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully,” he said quietly. “It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr Butler, who is a relative of mine.”

At that, Sumner tried to rise, but Brooks was too quick for him. He lifted his thick gutta-percha cane, with its heavy golden top, and brought it savagely down on Sumner’s head, again and again. Sumner fell. Blood trickled down his face. He was trapped behind his desk; he could not get up. Still the blows rained down, Brooks lashing away like a man possessed. Sumner was unconscious now. At last, some of Brooks’s colleagues managed to pull him off. A pool of blood spread across the floor of the Senate.

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Although Charles Sumner didn’t die that afternoon, the sheer violence of the assault struck many Americans, even at the time, as a terrible harbinger of the horror ahead. But while thousands of anti-slavery Northerners joined rallies in Sumner’s support, the reaction in the South was very different.

Ordinary people sent Brooks hundreds of new canes to replace his own shattered weapon; one was inscribed “Hit him again”. Many Southern politicians insisted that Sumner had exaggerated his injuries, dismissing the fake news of the abolitionist media. And on the fire-breathing wing of the Southern press, there was no doubt about who was really in the wrong. Brooks’s attack was “good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequences”, declared the Richmond Enquirer. Ideally, it said, the “vulgar abolitionists in the Senate” should be “lashed into submission”.

Today, historians see the Brooks-Sumner confrontation as a milestone on the United States’ road to the Civil War, encapsulating the collapse of civility, the triumph of tribalism and the disappearance of the political middle ground. I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the past couple of years. And I thought about it again this week amid the frenzied reaction to the FBI’s raid on Donald Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, where he is alleged to have taken — and even tried to destroy — confidential government documents.

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Put aside, if you can, your own views about the rights and wrongs of the FBI raid. Perhaps it really is a sign of the overreach of the deep state, determined to smear and undermine a decent American patriot. Or perhaps it’s a welcome reminder that nobody, not even a former president, is above the law. Perhaps you think Donald Trump isn’t the kind of man who would trample roughshod over rules and conventions; perhaps you simply can’t imagine him making off with classified records and trying to flush them down the toilet. Or perhaps you think he is — and you can.

But this isn’t really the issue. Does anybody really see the fate of Donald Trump’s paperwork as the most pressing challenge facing the American republic? The more interesting question — as with the caning of Charles Sumner in 1856 — is what the whole imbroglio tells us about the health, or otherwise, of American politics.

As soon as news of the FBI raid broke, Republicans almost unanimously rushed to denounce the agency’s abuse of power, and to defend the former president as the victim of a witch-hunt. Would they, I wonder, have said the same thing if, say, the FBI had raided Hillary Clinton’s house in search of her controversial private emails? I doubt it, somehow.

And it works the other way around, too. The same Democrats glorying in Mr Trump’s embarrassment today would have been appalled if the FBI had applied the same tactics to Mrs Clinton yesterday. You don’t hear many liberal Democrats wondering if the FBI was a bit heavy-handed, just as you don’t find many conservative Republicans insisting that nobody must be above the law. And you didn’t find many pro-slavery Southerners in 1856 rushing to condemn Preston Brooks. In the 2020s, as in the 1850s, the tribalism is total, and partisanship is all.

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To get a sense of what today’s successors to those antebellum Southern editorialists are thinking, I turned to Fox News. First up was the conservative classical historian Victor Davis Hanson. “Biden Administration is Using Soviet-Style Tactics to Crush its Political Opponents” read the banner at the bottom of the screen. Hanson was in no doubt: the FBI raid was a plot by the Democrats running the “national security state”. “They believe they’re morally superior to America and therefore any means [are] necessary or justifiable for their morally superior ends,” he said grimly. “Right now, we don’t have the rule of law in Washington.”

That, I thought, is a pretty bleak thing to say about your own government. An odd thing, too, since the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, is an avowed, card-carrying Republican. I had a quick look at his biography. It turns it out he went to the same New York private school as Donald Trump, Jr., then the same Massachusetts boarding school, Phillips Academy, as the two Bush presidents. He served in George W. Bush’s administration and was appointed to run the FBI by… Donald Trump himself!

I suppose it’s just plausible that Wray has been playing a very long game, and has been a radical leftist all along. Or it’s possible that despite his long Republican service, he’s a man of such careerist self-interest and deep moral spinelessness that in the last two years he’s allowed himself to become a puppet for the sick neo-Stalinists running the Biden Administration. Possible, but not terribly probable.

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Anyway, back I went to Fox News. Maybe the conservative talk show host Greg Gutfeld would add a bit of perspective, or at least lighten the mood? Not a bit of it. The FBI raid had been cold-bloodedly planned, Gutfeld said, to provoke Mr Trump’s supporters, inciting them into “another January 6th”. They — the deep state — “want an excuse to track down more Republicans and people in red hats… Walls are closing in. Tick, tick, tick. Boom. This is it.”

Once again, dark territory. You could easily forget that at the heart of all this is basically an argument about some paperwork. But of course the paperwork isn’t the point; the point is the existential, apocalyptic, all-or-nothing conflict between right and wrong, good and evil, blue and red — which, as we are always being told, is a “struggle for the soul of America”.

Another Fox host, Will Cain, put it very starkly. “A day after the FBI’s raid on former president Donald Trump,” he told his viewers, “we are starting to see what a permanent national split looks like. A divorce. Nobody wants to say it out loud, but it’s true. And this is not simply a break between Democrats and Republicans. No, that’s too simple. What we are seeing is a divide between people who are willing to use the power of the state to silence their opponent and those who are unwilling.”

Put aside the exaggeration of that final sentence, and is he wrong? There are tens of millions of Americans who don’t follow politics closely, don’t spend their time shouting at their opponents on social media and certainly don’t see themselves as foot-soldiers in some future civil war. But in many ways the reaction to the FBI raid feels like precisely the kind of thing you’d see in the early chapter of some book subtitled “How the Second Civil War Began”. The partisanship. The distrust. The belief that your adversaries are part of a giant, malevolent conspiracy. The dismissal of facts that don’t fit. And above all, the sense, as in the late 1850s, that the stakes just could not be higher. “Walls are closing in. Tick, tick, tick. Boom…”

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Is talk of a new civil war so ludicrous? The Oxford history professor Adam Smith, one of the shrewdest observers of American politics I know, recently sketched out a scenario for the Sunday Times, suggesting that “red America and blue America would become increasingly antagonistic entities, competing for the allegiance of a clutch of divided ‘purple’ states.” In this scenario, he writes, “it is easy to imagine that with the Republican majority on the Supreme Court baked in for decades, and an electoral system that gives an advantage to rural Republican states, the big Democratic states such as California and New York will push for more and more autonomy.” And if the federal government pushed back, who knows what might happen?

Even at a grassroots level, you can see signs of trouble. Writing for UnHerd in January, the essayist James Pogue reported that in his rural northern California county, “there is a very totalising war of worldviews, touched off by the pandemic and resistance to expert advice and state action, led by a militia-aligned faction that thinks the local government betrayed the county’s free-living values by participating in California’s Covid protocols”. There haven’t, Pogue noted, “been any bombings or shootings, but there have been fights, and much of the local police force is more or less openly sympathetic to the radical faction. The Right in the county is now almost entirely alienated from the other structures of government, and it is hard to see how this situation could change.”

Too bleak? Perhaps. When I visited America before Easter, it didn’t feel like a country on the brink. The sun shone. The shops were busy. People wandered happily about, as friendly and hospitable as ever. In two weeks, I didn’t hear a single remark about politics. Nor did I see a single MAGA hat, or a Trump T-shirt — and this in Florida.

But I would probably have said similar things in the summer of 1856, too. The sun often shines, before the storm.

Perhaps Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous apopthegm is his brisk declaration that “there is no second act in American lives”. It’s a brilliant line, but if we take it at face value (and assume he’s talking about a two-act rather than a three- or five-act play) it’s not only off-beam; it ignores that the second acts of American lives are in most cases more fascinating than the first ones.  

This is a physical image of Trump’s ego: it was inflated and distended by his tenure as one of the most important men in the world, but it was punctured by the 2020 election. His importance wheezed out of him and continues to do so, and the great vast balloon of his ego now hangs deflated in folds and swags. What is he to do with all that baggy drapery?

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The thing that I suspect will have pierced him is that the initial, rancorous version was greeted not with outrage and front-page coverage so much as the odd wry little smirk. “Jesus couldn’t have said it any better,” was the response of a writer for the New York Times. The libs are no longer triggered, still less owned. Trump is in the process of sliding gently from the news pages back to the diary columns or the “And finally…” section. 

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In any event, all states have now ratified their results without serious incident, and the hucksterish post-election litigation efforts undertaken by Trump’s various sundry representatives have predictably gone nowhere. Yesterday, Republican senate leader Mitch McConnell even declared Biden the “president-elect” and now the Democrat is faithfully filling his forthcoming administration with a cast of characters drawn directly from the pits of the Washington, DC Democratic Party professional class — the same people whom he openly campaigned on rehabilitating and restoring to power.

The election is well and truly over, whatever toothless protestations may continue to arise.

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What’s far from over, however, is the political influence of Trump. No one can say with total certainty what he’ll do when he eventually leaves office; no one can even say exactly on what terms he’s going to leave. But in just over a month now, we may face a scenario that would be a first in modern US history: an aggrieved former president making a competing claim to the presidency and refusing in perpetuity to acknowledge the reality of his defeat. In other words, a “shadow” president.

Trump’s lack of compunction about doing something like this would seem to solidify his position as the most thoroughgoing “post-exceptionalist” president since at least World War II. That is, he is entirely unmoved by the kind of bipartisan “American exceptionalism” dogma that had previously bound together the elite US political class, across partisan lines. It’s the dogma which holds that, in short, the US possesses a singular uniqueness that sets it apart in all of world history. Often blended together with notions of Christian providence, it ascribes the very foundations of the US Constitutional order with a kind of divine import.

But over the last four years, Trump has thrown these old assumptions into doubt. For one thing, the Constitution certainly makes no provision for a “shadow” president. How could a country with a mystically-endowed “exceptional” nature — the “shining city on a hill,” Ronald Reagan once proclaimed — be said to retain its “exceptional” status if its elections are, as Trump vigorously maintains, structurally and systematically fraudulent?

“The whole world is watching, and the whole world is laughing at our electoral process,” Trump recently charged, during the same rant in which he also condemned Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State as “an enemy of the people”. He’s also taken to referring to the US as a “third world country” on similar grounds. A president for whom the doctrine of American exceptionalism was a genuinely animating principle would be less inclined to encourage the impression that America’s system of choosing its elected leaders is so hopelessly corrupt that it deserves to be the object of international ridicule.

That Trump has harped on this theme with negligible public opposition from conservatives and Republicans suggests an ongoing reformulation in how the US Right conceptualises the very notion of “American exceptionalism”. It’s the culmination of a longstanding trend in terms of how conservatives have processed the experience of Trump; nationalism has been disentangled from reverence for institutions like the FBI and CIA which have been among the most frequent targets of Trump opprobrium. Even his popularisation of the term “Deep State” cuts against traditional American exceptionalist theology — America was never supposed to be the type of country that could even have a “Deep State” in the first place.

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Given that Trump is so profuse in his proclamations of nationalistic fervour, this element of his underlying worldview has often been obscured. But it’s not as though he’s really tried to hide it: shortly before launching his candidacy in 2016, he went on an extended soliloquy explaining how he “never liked” the term “American Exceptionalism” in the first place, and accused US politicians of “insulting the world” when they use it.

Nor did the prestige of office meaningfully change Trump’s attitude on the matter. During a pregame Superbowl interview shortly after he took power in 2017, he was asked by interviewer Bill O’Reilly about Russia. Drawing a kind of off-handed moral equivalence that would have once been unthinkable for a sitting president to propose, Trump replied: “What, you think our country’s so innocent?” This dark — but again, not-entirely-wrong — view of everything from the US intelligence services, to the principles undergirding US foreign policy, to the motives of workaday state and local election officials, always set him rhetorically apart from his more guarded predecessors.

And as is typical with Trump, the grievances he wildly purveys usually have at least a kernel of truth to them. He will have a reasonable argument in his post-presidency, for instance, that his tenure was “rigged” from before it started due to the depredations of select CIA/FBI malefactors who colluded against him. In December 2016, when the first official accusation that he’d been sinisterly aided by “Russian interference” was leaked via unnamed members of the “intelligence community,” he instructed his press department to retort: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” It was a justifiable statement. But then, a few weeks later, Trump would liken the CIA and FBI to the Third Reich. Again — not the rhetorical style of your typical “American exceptionalist”.

It’s in that context that both Trump and his supporters feel they have more than ample justification to claim, possibly for decades to come, that he was defrauded rather than defeated in this election. The issue is not even so much that they believe the election was literally fraudulent — although they do. But more elementally, what they believe is that the opposition to Trump was the culmination of a “rigged” process in a sense that far transcends the administrative mechanics of absentee ballot distribution in Wisconsin.

These grievances will persist whether or not Trump wields state power. But there are plenty of informal powers that a newly-christened “shadow president” could conceivably wield. Having garnered 74.2 million votes — more than anyone in history, except Joe Biden — he’ll have a limitless range of options to continue exerting political influence. The first thing virtually any ambitious Republican who wants to win a competitive primary election will seek is his endorsement. We can likely expect a steady stream of flamboyantly-orchestrated pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago.

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President Manuel López Obrador of Mexico — a Left-wing populist who developed an idiosyncratic bond with Trump — potentially provides something of a precedent for the Trump to emulate. After Obrador’s loss in the 2006 Mexico presidential election, the candidate openly rejected the outcome on the basis of what he said was widespread fraud. He even went so far as to participate in his own counter-inauguration event, attended by huge numbers of supporters, and declared himself head of a “parallel government.” It took another twelve years, but Obrador eventually won the official presidency on his own terms.

Trump probably lacks the concentration of mind to replicate Obrador’s feat; governing always seemed to be his least favourite part of the job, anyway. More probably, he will be permitted to once again inhabit his most natural state, which is that of pundit-in-chief. However should he choose to forge this new, yet-to-be defined role as a “shadow president”, he’ll have hastened the reversion of the US to a country with a manifestly less “exceptional” stature — and it would be perfectly in keeping with his long-expressed worldview.

In a way, this isn’t an entirely bad thing — it could bring a much-needed dose of humility to those whose livelihoods have long been predicated on fictionalised “American Exceptionalism” fantasies — especially to the DC think-tank class whose foreign policy obsessions usually entail imposing Americanised democratic customs on other countries by force. That will be far harder to rationalise when a former president dedicates his life to insisting that American democratic customs are… a farce.