We former fans of Donald J. Trump can all remember where we were when we finally admitted that the POTUS was potty. We would now be required to grimly gorge on so much humble pie that we might as well go in for a competitive eating contest and make some money out of it.

For me, it was when he appeared this week to be making sport with the awful event in Doncaster, when a mentally disturbed young man entered a tiger’s enclosure in a ‘wildlife park’ and was killed by the imprisoned beast. It was a tragedy for both: for the man, obviously, and those who loved him, but for the animal too, whose confusion was clear. All its life, this apex predator has been fed huge quantities of meat like a giant neutered tabby cat, but on seeing a vulnerable living creature in front of him, he obviously felt a strange stir of memory. You could see the hesitation – and then the terrible instinct taking over, as he throws off the habit of having his food brought to him already dead and does what he was designed to do.

I do believe that we are witnessing the end of America

After sharing online footage of this almost surreally sad event on his ‘Truth Social’ platform (with the text ‘Don’t ever mess with nature! President DJT’) Trump proceeded to go full tonto by following it up with a series of after-midnight posts. This included an AI-generated video of himself wrestling with a tiger and coming out on top, ultimately embracing it to the strains of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’. Another video finds the big orange baboon comparing himself to a lion – yes, ‘the king of the jungle’ – while characterising Democrat luminaries such as Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi as ‘jackals, hyenas…barking at him, laughing at him…every once in a while the lion has to show the jackals who he is’.

As if this unhinged take on The Jungle Book wasn’t jaw-dropping enough, there were a slew of other midnight-oil online musings. This included one wherein a voice-over makes the somewhat immoderate claim that Trump has been appointed by the Almighty as ‘caretaker’ of the world, with another dig at his nay-sayers as ‘wolves’ and ‘vipers’ – just in case we hadn’t got the anthropomorphic memo.

It’s an awful shock to those of us who have talked him up over the years and – somewhat shamefully – greeted each new breach of decency with an indulgent what-a-wag/take-that-snowflakes chuckle, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Trump greeted the invention of social media with the immoderate glee of a man who reportedly has never drunk alcohol or taken illegal substances; it appears to be, literally, his drug of choice. As one who has had their own troubles with the addictive rush of the heady dopamine hit of being ‘liked’ by total strangers as one lays into another total stranger – and I speak as someone who has fiercely consumed both drugs and drink – I’d like to say I sympathise. But then, I’m not the most powerful person in the world, from whom a certain standard of public decorum is historically expected.

If Trump did do drugs and/or drink, he might use them as an excuse. That would be bad enough. But to do these things in one’s right mind suggests that there is something very wrong with that mind; the phrase ‘second childhood’ occurs, when an aged person behaves in a way we might more readily associate with a badly-socialised brat. At the age of 80, Trump does seem like a particularly silly child, perhaps one who has consumed an excessive amount of E-numbers at his own birthday party and is one gummy sweet away from jumping on the table and announcing that he’s the king of the castle and those funny foreign kids are dirty rascals.

He has previous, of course, to his grotesque Carnival Of The Animals variations online. This spring he appeared to depict himself as Jesus Christ during a spat with the Pope, and come summer he could be ‘seen’ shooting the breeze with JFK. It’s likely that he is very lonely, having seen off a good number of his IRL friends by allowing his monstrous ego out to play once too often. Regrettably, I know how this feels.

But another aspect of his online life provides the one meagre excuse I have for so enthusiastically cheerleading for the brute. (Apart from his very sound determination to keep cross-dressers out of girls and women’s sport.) Earlier this year, Trump made an AI video of himself as a doctor, diagnosing the highly irritating likes of Whoopi Goldberg and Rosie O’Donnell with ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ (TDS). Like Brexit Derangement Syndrome before it, this was indeed a very real phenomenon which saw sufferers robbed of all critical facilities. Amusingly, being affected by it appeared to turn the victim into a copy of the person they hated most, pontificating and fulminating to the point of insensibility.

The wholesale attempted weaponising of the celebrity class in favour of first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris (the first senile, the second extremely silly) turned out to be the dampest of squibs. This was not surprising to anyone who has come across the hilarious fact that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 list of celebrity backers warrants a Wikipedia page of its own, so long is it. If anything, the celeb endorsements were vote-winners for Trump, as ordinary people have a stubborn tendency not to listen to the views of people who have spent their working lives doing things they love and being rewarded with kings’ ransoms.

But of course, TDS is no excuse for my foolhardy fawning over this man. I should have drawn the line at the persistent sex-pest allegations, the ludicrous call for a ‘united Ireland’ and, more than anything, his repeated disrespect towards President Zelensky. This has now come to a head after Trump attempted to humiliate this dignified and stoic man by mocking his clothes. The US President’s cuddling up to Vladimir Putin seems to know no limits now.

I’m ashamed that it took me so long to see sense; I swallowed that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ cliche to a point where I couldn’t seem to see past it. Like a long relationship you’ve invested a lot in, I’d defended him to my incredulous friends for so long that to back down would make me look like an atrocious judge of character – which I am, and always have been, and so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

I would say in my defence that the years of tolerance – affection, even – of many intelligent people for Trump says a lot about the shocking quality of the Democratic candidates. But I do believe that we are witnessing the end of America; not as an actual country, but as a magic kingdom of the mind, the place of which F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote:

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter – it was a willingness of the heart…

Donald J. Trump, ranting in his isolated grandeur, unwilling to offer the assistance that could make or break Ukraine’s war effort, makes a fitting figurehead for this downfall. I’m not conceited enough to believe that my opinion ever swayed anybody – but shame on me for being fooled by him for so long.