Curiously, though, polling shows that when American voters see more of Mr Trump his popularity declines. Whereas, when they see less of him, his popularity squirts up – a bad omen, you’d think, in a popularity contest. Yet it might make the task of beating Trump easier if swooning Democrats can just cause more people to see him, and by framing him the way they want him seen – which is pretty much as he is: a bloated, orangish, cartoon creature spouting nonsense and untruth a mile a minute, a figure so unreal and inauthentic it might be difficult to make him out clearly.

In what may turn out to have been a providential stroke (though it seemed to me too tame at the time), Harris’s brain trust, last summer, hit upon a momentarily resonant strategy – portraying Mr Trump as “weird” rather than as the great Satan. A diminished buffoon. No one to take seriously. This is a familiar American archetype, one we all grew up with. The incompetent, slightly daft village screw-loose. A sort of feral Oliver Hardy – unquestionably an individual most Americans wouldn’t imagine being president, albeit not misreading the threat he fecklessly poses to us and the world.

Thus. Seeing Trump as he bizarrely presents is what we citizens will have to do if he incongruously wins back the presidency. This is how we face it.

Plus, setting goofy archetypes aside, I find myself taking perverse comfort that such a man as strange as Trump actually submits to running for the presidency at all, that he mounts an actual campaign, worries and fidgets and blasphemes that he might not win. That he fears prison – just the way a normal, non-orange person would. This suggests to me that Donald Trump is at heart an institutional creature; a clownishly spoiled child, always trying to get away with something, but who knows it and knows better; a man, in Trump’s case, who cares inordinately about how he looks and how history will judge him. His Maga followers may be nihilists and anarchists and thugs, or just greedy oligarchs who cheat on their taxes. But Trump is (one almost wants to say merely) a narcissist, whose most destabilising defect is that he and we never know what he’s going to say or do next. Listen to his speeches – if you can. All he wants is to please and aggrandise himself. Big, complicated countries may pride themselves on having strong leaders, but they thrive on predictability and consistency at the top. Whereas Trump’s idea of leading is just to say stuff – such as abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency, or terminating the constitution, or injecting bleach into humans to cure Covid. After which he says other opposite stuff – such as after boasting about abolishing the right to an abortion, he declares himself a supporter of reproductive freedom. He’s nearly 80 – my age, for Christ’s sake.

So, if he becomes president again we need not to take up arms against our neighbours or relocate to Bali or Connemara, but to strive evermore to see Trump as that strange but knowable creature he is. More like our fallible selves than the great destroyer. This can be our way to preserve our country: vigilantly to see Donald Trump so we can vigorously oppose him, stymie him, impugn him, deride and defeat him using whatever institutions of government he can’t abolish. As with all our 46 presidents, governing the US has always required a battle.

And by the theory of lasts, I also happen to think that President Donald Trump doesn’t really want his legacy to be that he took down the United States of America – no matter what he says. Not that I think he’s really a good guy, down deep. He’s really not. He just couldn’t do without the US. Its institutions and traditions are his vital context. But whether he wins or loses, I have to stay hopeful – not let him turn me against my better self or my country’s. In the end, I think there’ll be more Americans who don’t want to see the US wrecked than there are those who do or who don’t care. There’s a chance good might prevail in November. We just can’t avert our gaze from the thought that it might not and in that way render ourselves unready.

First, though, there’s November fifth. We need to vote.

Marilynne Robinson

Award-winning novelist and essayist whose 2005 book, Gilead, won the Pulitzer prize

A great source of energy behind the rise of the Maga phenomenon is the idea, and realisation, that there has been a pervasive and highly effective campaign of indoctrination going on in this country for decades, since the civil rights movement. All societies indoctrinate their members, of course. They educate, adjudicate, give or withhold approval, expressing and reinforcing assumptions that support institutions and shape character. In our case the indoctrination was meant to promote change rather than to maintain a status quo. The country had, beginning in the 1950s, passed through a great awakening, more powerful than most. Americans realised finally that prevalent attitudes about colour and gender led to insupportable injustice and the suppression of gifted populations. The problem was societal. Behind any instance of insult or exclusion there were the prejudices that normalised such behaviour. So, much of America set about to change these attitudes. The work is not done but the effort has been fruitful enough to have triggered a potent reaction against it in the past decade.

“Indoctrination” is a word with darkly negative connotations. But the best societies do have doctrines which at least name their aspirations, and they teach them, actively and passively. In our case, the promotion of reform came under the hostile scrutiny of the conspiracy-minded. The genius of this worldview is that no policy or idea has to be considered on its merits because it is all scheming and fakery, however apparently plausible. No fact need be acknowledged, no source credited unless it is wise to the great deception. Debate and persuasion are defeated before they begin.

The recoil from liberalisation has placed its opponents in a very strange place. When America was church-going and many churches were sound, precepts that ran against the grain of personal interest were familiar and respected. These revanchists overwhelmingly claim to be Christian, but if loving the neighbour, not to mention the stranger or the enemy, involves any cost or disadvantage they are outraged. With Trump as their guide and model, they have found their way to a netherworld of primitive emotions. We know these feelings from the cradle, though we may unlearn them at an attentive mother’s knee. Basically, they go like this: if I feel fear, then something or someone is threatening me and this must be dealt with as a matter of extreme urgency. So too with anger and resentment. Greed belongs in this suite of primal emotions because it is admired and because it lies behind fear of the loss of status, whatever that may have amounted to, and behind the anxious certainty that others’ prosperity must diminish one’s own. No profit or happiness is imagined that might come to a society truly committed to justice.

I have been amazed and appalled to see my great-hearted America go into eclipse behind this mean, undignified nonsense. My former home state, Iowa, has turned deep red, rejected its own liberal history, relaxed its child labour laws, cut food aid to poor children, banned books, prohibited equity policies in state universities, and on and on.

But then came the Democratic national convention, and our much disparaged diversity showed its beautiful face. I am old enough to know how much has been accomplished, how gratifying it is to have the benefit of the brilliance and purpose of people who, in my childhood, had virtually no voice or presence in public life. The convention was a joyous celebration of the fact that we do know how to reform, which gives us practical hope for further reform. The change in the political atmosphere in this country has been unbelievably swift, in fact sudden. The emergence of Kamala Harris has put matters in extremely capable hands, clearly. And many of us, quite possibly an electoral majority, were waiting for the day when civility, humanity and hope would reassert themselves.

If Harris wins I expect important continuity with Biden, especially regarding foreign affairs. I would expect big programmes like his, to ease the housing shortage, for example. I think she would support and enhance education and healthcare, the kinds of things expected of a Democrat. A normal president has a strong interest in basic continuity, with changes the public and the Congress can agree to support. I would expect her to be strategic and persuasive.

If Trump wins, I don’t think anyone, even he, knows what to expect. Everything depends on what he thinks from day to day are his interests, and how they can best be served. He has his pals and is very readily influenced by them, and by flattery. As a rhetorical tactic, he makes truly terrible threats involving mass deportations of immigrants, also concentration camps, prosecution of critics and political opponents, and he makes truly crazy threats, like bombing drug cartels in Mexico or giving Putin free rein in Europe. He desolates the landscape of rational expectation, then if he hasn’t done anything as dreadful as his threats, it is as if there were nothing in the malicious lunacy he offers to his crowds that should alarm us. Major Republican politicians support him on this basis. He has acquired vast latitude on the grounds that few actually believe anything he says. How do you challenge someone with no credibility? I have never heard of such a creature, or seen influence like his. He says hideous things about America to people swaddled in flags and they cheer themselves hoarse. He is neither Christian nor nationalist but he might stir up a crusade of sorts among people who claim these identities in order to fall into line with him. God knows how that would end. He is silent about normal policy positions. He wants to cut taxes. The wealthy would benefit.

We may expect him to govern in accordance with his own interests as he perceives them – an adviser might suggest he be more presidential, but that would mean no more calling names or selling gimmicks to suckers, so that won’t happen. Other than that, he seems to feel he has the mandate of heaven without regard to votes. If he actually is elected, he will be full of a sense of the truly preposterous power of an American president, and of whatever retrogressive or retributive use he might try to make of it.