As for Max Boot, Senator McCarthy accused Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower and General George C. Marshall, of being Communist dupes, and incited pathological fears that the U.S. government was a vast infestation of Soviet agents and traitors, and that communists arose as if infected by a virus, all over America, and had to be exterminated like termites. Where Max Boot imagines Donald Trump fits into any such nightmare escapes my comprehension. The French National Front is a Poujadist petit bourgeois party that is alarmed about Islamic terror in a country that has suffered a lot of it and where 10 per cent of the population is Muslim. The party leader, Marine Le Pen, expelled her own father from membership because he is a Holocaust minimizer.

What Donald actually advocates is the deportation of 351,000 illegal immigrants convicted of crimes and now imprisoned; the end of illegal immigration by building an Israeli-like wall along the Mexican border; an (as yet unspecified) screening process to justify the deportation of some of the illegals and the normalization of the others; and although he advocates the suspension already mentioned of Muslim immigration (not the Christians who are almost half of the refugees), he at least acknowledges that the United States is partly responsible for the political chaos that generated this humanitarian tragedy in the first place. He wants only a small increase in defence spending, reallocated to more effective anti-terrorism; and universal health care through health savings accounts and by smashing the insurance cartel. He is for the gradual legalization of most drugs; is a militant anti-polluter, but correctly (on present evidence) regards climate change and cap-and-trade as hoaxes. He wants to leave education (and same-sex marriage) to the states and to give them the money now wasted in the federal Department of Education. He would ban only late-term abortions, and not when there were overriding circumstances. He would reform the corrupt shambles of campaign financing by abolishing super-PACs and soft money, and lift limits on individual contributions to political candidates. He is a moderate protectionist opposite cheap labour countries, and advocates marginal income tax reductions and the reconstitution of the bloated national debt as a sinking fund to be gradually reduced by spending restraint, implicitly involving an imprecise level of entitlement-reform.

Trump opposes foreign intervention in areas where the U.S. has no natural interest, including Ukraine and Syria, but wants a redefinition of the national security interest of the country, and wants to protect that interest, unlike Obama, but not over-extend it, unlike George W. Bush. This is not a radical program. He is fed up with those mealy-mouthed politicians and commentators who nibble around issues and show more concern for the sensibilities of Islam than the security of America, and who ignored every major issue that has arisen for decades — abortion, illegal immigration, wealth disparity, the corruption of campaign financing, and he is not wrong.