Fear trumps hope

WHEREVER the eye falls in Donald Trump’s Manhattan office, on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, there is Trump. Images of the tycoon glower from walls plastered with covers of Playboy, GQ, Newsweek and more. Piles of campaign literature—“Trump—Make America Great Again!”—jostle with stacks of more recent Trump-fronted publications on a desk so packed as to recall a dentist’s waiting room. A mound of Trump-covered copies of The Economist has pride of place: “I put you up front,” he says solicitously.

The pride Mr Trump takes in such self-aggrandising trumpery is almost touching. His Aladdin’s cave of celebrity puff, which doubles as the headquarters of a presidential campaign and large property company, is sufficiently eccentric to recall why his candidacy, announced at Trump Tower last June, was at first ridiculed. He looked like a chancer—a reality television star, with no serious political experience, who had changed his political stripes at least four times. Yet Mr Trump’s victory in Indiana on May 3rd (see article) has made him the presumptive Republican nominee. His remaining opponents, Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich, have quit the race. He was for far too long underestimated. The same must not be said of the threat his egomania and pernicious nativism represents to America and the world.