If Joe Biden won’t pass the torch now, then when?

This is surely now the strangest presidential race in history.

It already features the two oldest candidates ever, neither at the peak of their powers, both prone to mixing stuff up. We’ve had bizarre interviews, a disastrous presidential debate, an assassination attempt – and now, as if the writers in this drama wanted to push the credulity of their audience a little further, one of them just got Covid.

At any time in any adult, Covid can be a nasty disease – but in an 81-year-old president of the United States, let us be clear, it could be rather more than that.

Enough already. The stakes are too high, for America and for the world, to view the prospect of a second term for Donald Trump with equanimity. Last time round, Trump was a disaster, but still restrained, a bit, by constitutional and human guardrails. He had cabinet members and staffers who would question him, ignore the madder stuff, and moderate the effects of his furies, at least until he fired them, which he did frequently.

As we saw on January 6th 2021, he had a vice president who would not break his oath of office just because Trump couldn’t stand losing an election. Next time round, God forbid, Trump will not only appoint slavishly loyal figures to the top jobs in government, but clear out much of the rest of the civil service and implant Maga fanatics whose only qualification to run the government of the United States is their cultish allegiance to Trump.

In JD Vance, he would have a vice president who, unlike Mike Pence, cheerfully admits he’d steal an election; and the Supreme Court, influenced by Trump-era appointees, has just granted the presidency blanket immunity from criminal prosecution for any executive actions. Trump has said he wants to be a