Gary Hart

It's been a bumpy month or so for newly elected Congressman George Santos, if that is his real name. Shortly after his upset win in November that flipped a key New York district from blue to red, reports began to surface showing he had told a few wee lies to voters on his way to Capitol Hill. He had not attended the prestigious college he said he had, he hadn’t worked at the big Wall Street firm, and, in the most humorous example, he had to admit he wasn’t Jewish but rather "Jew-ish." Politicians have always been known to have a tenuous relationship with the literal truth, but they used to be creative, even talented at it. Today they resemble a toddler claiming he did not steal the cookie from the jar as he’s chewing it.

At a drinks party in Washington DC just after Donald Trump was elected, someone from the old regime told me: ‘This will end with tanks on the White House lawn.’ It was a popular opinion that night, although there was confusion over whether the tank barrels would point inwards or outwards. Would Trump do something so outrageous that he would have to be removed by the US military? Or would he declare himself president-for-life with help from the generals? At the time, I put this down to shock at Trump’s unexpected victory, an early example of Trump Derangement Syndrome. But now, in the final stages of the 2020 campaign, you hear speculation like this from both sides of the political divide. Dictatorship, state of emergency, civil war?