It’s not ending with Trump. Now we’re under attack from his clones

September 13, 2026 — 1:21pm

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Of all the weird things occurring in the US right now (Measles are back! Cold War with Canada!) one of the strangest has been the rise of the Trump clones.

Their origin dates back to 2016. As the then Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, Trump infamously declared that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters. It’s, like, incredible.”

Marvelling at the prospect of engaging in criminal behaviour while retaining electability, Trump went on to prove his hypothesis, notching up convictions for sexual assault and defamation and 34 counts of falsifying business records in a hush money case involving his affair with a porn star. He was then elected president again.

Now, as the US heads towards November midterm elections, Trump’s revelation that acts of violence, immorality and criminality no longer preclude running for public office has seemingly become normalised. It’s now incredible if a candidate running for office in the US doesn’t have a skeleton in the closet. Or tattooed to his chest, as in the case of the former Democratic Senate candidate for Maine, Graham Platner, whose skull-and-crossbones tattoo, which closely resembled the Nazi Totenkopf, caused a minor furore. Fortunately for Platner, these days there’s a higher tolerance for white supremacist-adjacent tattoos among holders of high office in the US, (as evinced by Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth’s ink), so it wasn’t until allegations of sexual........

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