The presumption that US elections are legitimate died last week in Washington. It was 237 years old. It did not die of one wound. It died of three, inflicted in a single day, in daylight, on the record. And the country, running to the loudest of them, never examined the one most likely to kill.

In critical care we distinguish the mechanism of death from its cause. The mechanism was a Thursday. The cause was chronic, progressive and untreated.

The morning belonged to the secretary of state. Before officials of more than 60 countries, he announced that the counterterrorism architecture of the free world, built over a generation against jihadist mass murder, should be rebuilt and aimed at the domestic left. He named a transnational enemy defined by hatred of the west, “a revolt of the worst against the best”. He tied it to Iran and to Cuba and offered no evidence for either link. He said the journalists and thinktanks who might check the claims often agree with the enemy’s goals. The move is old and reliable: discredit the second opinion in advance.

Midday belonged to the White House deputy chief of staff. What he said deserves to be quoted rather than summarized, because summary is a mercy it has not earned. He called “leftwing political terrorism” a “fatal cancer of civilization”. He said that its politics, left to run its course, “always becomes a gulag”. He said antifa demonstrators........

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