Tangerine Eidolon

Though many traitors escape hanging, the Trumpster and his hydrophobic head-tribble have been strung up in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, albeit only in pictorial form: a Time magazine photograph is substituting until a portraitist can be found with sufficiently few artistic scruples and industrial quantities of orange paint. The Trumpster is shown seated at the Resolute Desk, with one of his little handettes stretched out on the surface and the other close to the magnifying camera, in a pose suggesting resolute haemorrhoids. His operator, the head-tribble, is framed with appropriate grandeur against one of the room's ludicrously pompous door-frames. Rather unfairly, the correspondent for Britain's leading liberal newspaper makes much of the picture's setting amid portraits of genuine statesmen and George H W Bush, as though the Trumpster régime were the first US presidential term with no chief executive. In fact, unlike the ga-ga Hollywood mediocrity in the 1980s and the grinning chimpanzee in the 2000s, the Trumpster and his head-tribble are merely the first interregnum in recent history to lose after only one term.