Six months ago I said to a well-known public figure that the US intelligence agencies had destroyed Trump’s first Presidency and that, in a second chance, he would have to uproot their entire leadership or simply let them continue to run the country and concentrate on making money for himself.

My contact replied that they had recently been told by Tucker Carlson that Trump was very aware of the danger that the intelligence services would have him assassinated. Trump was therefore likely to go for the second option. The last sentence was the musing of my contact, not of Tucker Carlson.

I am not suggesting that the intelligence services were behind the assassination attempt this weekend. I have no idea. I am however wondering what thoughts are currently flitting through Trump’s head about his near-death experience.

I was incidentally trying to calculate what fraction of a degree the rifle was mis-aimed by, to miss his brain by one inch at a range of 120 yards. My maths were not up to it, but it is a margin of the tiniest tremor of the hand on the trigger.

I think it is almost certain that Trump has wondered whether the security lapse were not, at the least, caused in part by a lack of zeal and enthusiasm on the part of those state actors co-ordinating his security.

That is no criticism of Trump’s immediate bodyguards, who acted admirably. It is also fair to note that Trump’s own defiance was courageous. He could not have known if other shooters were around, nor how seriously he had himself been hit already.

That personal bearing has almost certainly increased his election chances. Even more so is the fact that, by some strange political alchemy with little relationship to logic, it appears to be accepted wisdom that this incident makes it much more difficult for Democrats to make Joe Biden stand down.

In his address from the White House, Biden did not mistake Trump for Frank Sinatra or forget why he was there. It is thus touted as restoring his position. It was however a typical Biden performance, snide and partisan, particularly in restating his 6 January narrative as though that were a serious threat to democracy and not a stupid, isolated riot.

That democracy in the United States is meaningless is plain from the choice offered to the electorate between two incredibly flawed individuals. It is a scenario you could not make up.

If you were to put Donald Trump and Joe Biden into an entirely random yoga class in Oklahoma, neither Trump nor Biden would be the person in that yoga class best suited to be President of the United States.

There is however one sense in which democracy in the United States is more alive than in the United Kingdom. Here the Establishment got the operative they wanted in Keir Starmer elected, but had no argument with the Tories other than over competence.

In the United States the Establishment is worried that Trump’s isolationist tendencies and lack of enthusiasm for starting wars, may damage the never-ending gravy train of the military industrial complex.

In particular Trump sees both China and Russia as potential trading partners with whom money can be made to mutual benefit. He does not see them primarily as a military threat.

Trump is in short not on board for the whole propaganda narrative that requires designated enemies to fuel massive defence spending, and justify the continuous series of invasions of other countries.

This is not ideological opposition to war on Trump’s part. It is simply that, like China, he realises that trade, finance, investment and soft power are ultimately much more lucrative than the classic western imperialist model of armed conquest.

Trump’s problem is that the powerful vested interests who make money from the western imperialist model include the intelligence services. That is why they ruthlessly undermined his first Presidency.

We saw the utter empty nonsense that was the “Russiagate” hoax, on which I have written extensively, but the simple fact remains there has never been any evidence whatsoever of Russian involvement in leaking the DNC, Clinton or Podesta emails.

We saw the hounding from office of Trump’s National Security Officer General Michael Flynn for conversations with the Russian Ambassador which, when finally released in full, turned out to be entirely proper. We saw the jailing of Roger Stone for lying to the FBI, which the mainstream media disgracefully failed to reveal was for claiming to have links with Wikileaks that he did not in fact have.

We had the famously putrid Guardian front page claiming Manafort/Assange meetings that never happened.

Then to cap it all we had the CIA co-ordinated monstering as fake of the Hunter Biden laptop revelations two weeks before the 2020 election.

That this laptop – which all concerned knew was genuine – was proclaimed false was perhaps the most significant example of fake news in the history of the world. That lying narrative was coordinated between security services, and mainstream media all over the western world and undoubtedly affected the election result.

Even more significantly, both Facebook and Twitter cooperated to suppress Hunter Biden laptop stories and to boost the narrative that the laptop was fake. There was therefore the perfect alliance – security services, state and corporate media, alternative media corporate gatekeepers – working together to promote a lie and ensure Biden’s election.

It says something about the world in which we live that the most important and successful fake news in history was set up precisely by those who claim to be the arbiters of fake news.

Which brings me back to the start of this article. What does Donald Trump do about it if he gets back in to power?

I think Trump is quite right to fear that were he to negotiate a reasonable settlement of the Ukraine war, rather than continue the multi trillion dollar bonanza of weapons, death and high energy prices it now is, then he might be assassinated by his own security services.

For Trump to really run the United States would require an unprecedented cleanout of the Clintonite leadership throughout the security establishment, going much deeper than a normal change of administration. I think Trump always did understand that but found it impractical to “drain the swamp”.

With the ailing Biden, it is obvious to everybody he is not actually in charge of anything. I predict that, if we get a Trump administration, Trump will not actually be in charge either but will settle for an easy life while allowing the Establishment to continue to run the country.

When Peter Cook founded the Establishment Club, nobody scoffed at him and said “what a silly conspiracy theorist, there is no such thing as the Establishment”. I prefer to use that word rather than Deep State. But it is the same thing.

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