So, Donald Trump has been given the Republican saddle for the US Presidential election later this year. I’m tempted to puerile mockery, because it seems so ludicrous, but the thought that damps me down to the point of a chill is that there is a very real chance that he might ride his horse to victory. Donald Trump is the celebrity candidate who says what entertainment-gorged masses want to hear. It would be true to say that he has never made a mistake while in senior political office but that is only because he has never been in senior political office; I’m sure his opponent, Hilary Clinton, will suffer in the coming months because she was allowed to ‘get away’ with an egregious breach of information security, one of several chinks in the armour of the woman who is the more serious candidate.

The question that should be asked to Mr Trump loud and clear, again and again, is just how he intends to fulfil his promises. Build a wall against Mexico? I’d like to see his costings and I’d like to see his analysis of how other wall strategies have worked out. I remember the world celebrating when the Berlin wall came down. How is the self-proclaimed “law and order” candidate going to bring an end to crime, given that no-one else in the world has managed it?

Trump paints a very bleak picture of the present state of America and the world; I am concerned that he seems just like the kind of demagogue depicted in numerous timelines of imagined dystopian futures. And, given the recent example set by the British people in the EU Referendum, I have very little confidence that unfounded guff won’t hold much more sway than reasoned decision making in the choice the US makes in November.