There are not, as far as I’m aware, any silver linings to the election of Donald Trump to a second term as US president.

In the few moments of Wednesday morning between waking and checking my phone, I hoped to maintain a normal amount of despair for the future. But it was not to be. Even the maintenance of an unconscionable status quo – war of extermination in the Middle East, aggressive westward expansion of Putin’s Russia, unfolding catastrophe of rising global temperatures – was, in the end, too much to be hoped for. The future, it seems, is likely to bring an intensification of these horrors rather than any hope of their subsiding.

One thing I can’t bring to myself to believe, however, is that four years of a Biden administration constituted any kind of blessed interregnum between two Trump terms – not, certainly, from a global perspective. Because in the future when I think of the current waning US presidency the face I suspect I will see is not that of Joe Biden himself – that mask of avuncular charm fading as his presidency wore on into one of decrepitude and near-existential vacancy – but that of Matthew Miller.

Perhaps you don’t know the name but you will surely know the face – with its keen features, its watchful eyes, its expression at once wary and conceited. You have seen him no doubt in his role as US State Department spokesperson, parrying question after question about Israel’s deepening depravity in Gaza and Lebanon, dismissing with smug........

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