ALTHOUGH budding young journalists are advised to “avoid cliches like the plague,” sometimes they are just too apposite to resist.

The biggest take-away from the Donald Trump saga so far is that US democracy is “the best that money can buy.”

That can only be the main explanation for how a brash, trashy, arrogant, nonsensical spiv like Trump could become president of the United States of America — and not once, but quite possibly twice.

He inherited a lucrative property portfolio from his father, who also passed on his own name, a bent for nepotism, and the Trump brand of self-effacing modesty. Since then, mini-Trump has successfully stayed out of prison despite a business history of dodgy share dealings, bankruptcies, loan defaults, charity law violations and corporate fraud cases. 

His pledges to publish details of his financial affairs have rarely been honoured, except on one occasion when the declared losses on his hotel and casino enterprises qualified him for a decade of tax-free status, despite a business empire valued at more than $1 billion. 

His latest acquisition has been the US Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D Eisenhower, but also more recently of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. A conservative, economically neoliberal alliance of big business moguls, small-town isolationists, alienated workers, racists and far-right nationalists now supports Trump, with most moderate voices in the party bribed or bullied into silence. 

Two-thirds of US company chief executives back the Republican Party, according to a recent multicollege research paper. Many right-wing Christian evangelicals back Trump, although there is nothing in the Bible that gives a free pass into heaven for such a notorious incubus. 

Compared with his business and political record — especially his inflammatory rhetoric aimed at immigrants, students, academics, anti-racists and opponents of Israeli genocide and his pro-Covid, pro-global warming ravings — Trump’s felony convictions last week were minor misdemeanours.

He faces three more trials on much more serious charges, although these are likely to take place after the presidential election on November 5.

So how come he is now a serious contender for a second spell at the White House, where he left so many dead bodies lying around during his reign of chaos last time?

First, his bogus anti-Establishment rants strike a chord with many working-class Americans who are victims of free-market capitalism and blame the Democratic Party (as well as immigration, liberalism, socialism, China, “wokeism,” etc) for not defending them.

Second, the Democratic Party itself refuses to fight for policies that could give people hope and a clear alternative to vote for.

Third, and more fundamentally, the enslavement of modern US society by the power of money has produced a society in which celebrity, violence, self-gratification and stupendous wealth are acclaimed, reason is derided and ignorance is exploited prolifically by bigots, charlatans, crooks and careerists of every stripe.

A victorious Joe Biden in November will do little or nothing to change any of this. He is a “liberal” career servant of monopoly capital, a staunch flag-waver for US imperialism around the world. 

He even trumpets the US “justice” system as a paragon of virtue now under threat from Trump — although this remains a system based on money, power, severe social inequality, racial discrimination, mass imprisonment and violations of human rights and international law by US military forces and state agencies around the world.

Trump is a monopoly capitalist who shares the same international outlook, albeit with some isolationist tendencies recently curbed by Pentagon hawks and US arms corporations. 

But his domestic agenda based on ignorance, xenophobia, hatred and conspiracy mania could deliver US society to the gates of hell should he win on Bonfire Night.