THE rough poetry of Bon Scott, the great Scottish singer-songwriter, resonated in Biarritz last week as the US President told the leaders of the free world about the size of his ballrooms. Donald Trump was speaking of his eagerness to host next year’s G7 summit at his golf resort in Miami. This facility, according to Mr Trump, has the “biggest ball-rooms in Florida”. His words recalled Big Balls, the late Mr Scott’s thoughtful and sardonic etude on glitzy hubris which he performed with the Scots/Australian rock band, AC/DC.

I'm upper, upper class high society

God's gift to ballroom notoriety

And I always fill my ballroom

The event is never small

All the social papers say I've got the biggest balls of all.

Sadly, some wretched and shallow people have chosen to be lascivious about this song and focus on its unintended double-entendres. Shame on them! Mr Scott hailed originally from Kirriemuir in Angus, a town of outstanding rectitude whose citizens, I’m sure, would recoil at such a thought. Mr Trump’s own lineage is rooted in Scotland’s Western Isles and he has often cited this as influencing his decision to invest in golf resorts in similarly douce locations in Aberdeenshire and Ayrshire. He brushes off accusations that he has disfigured the presidency by using it as a high-class marketing vehicle for these places, and others across the United States.

Yet, as his bizarre vaudeville performance in the south of France demonstrated once more, these are trifling matters when set alongside his most recent behaviour. Last week he took to abusing his predecessor, Barack Obama, as he derided him in adolescent terms for being out-smarted by Vladimir Putin. The man from The Washington Post, that most persistent and implacable of Mr Trump’s media scrutineers could scarce hide his scorn. “In four days,” he wrote, “Trump imposed new tariffs on China, called the country’s president an ‘enemy,’ admitted ‘second thoughts’ on the escalating trade war, reversed course hours later to say he only wished he had raised the tariffs higher, and then vowed a deal would be coming soon – because China wants one desperately, in the president’s telling. Doesn’t that make it harder, a reporter asked, to make a deal? ‘Sorry, it’s how I negotiate,” he said. “It’s been very successful over the years.’”

The New York Times which has chosen to be less disobliging than its east coast rival of Mr Trump and his pantomime administration, is reporting that some of Trump’s Republican colleagues are now simply weary of the daily slew of foam-flecked invective from the White House’s resident Pennywise. All manner of psychological maladies are inferred by the political cognoscenti as they seek to explain how we got here. But what if the US President is hatching the political equivalent of a giant Ponzi scheme in which it pays for him to launch new and ever more bizarre twitches and paroxysms to make us forget all the past indiscretions as they struggle to chronicle the latest ones?

You keep waiting for an uprising of sorts against this man who has spent the 31 months of the presidency trolling the world and shaming his nation’s dignity. It will never come, though. The Washington elites might privately disdain him and not because he’s an embarrassment. Unlike them he doesn’t camouflage savagery and brutality in a Princeton. They hate him because he has exposed what they truly are and what they truly represent.

His predecessors all embraced Fifth Avenue sleekness and Harvard eloquence but it was a lie as they butchered a third-world civilisation on their bicycles and rice fields and murdered their children at My Lai, merely for having chosen a different political system. Most countries which fancy themselves civilised began to stop hunting for witches around 300 years ago; in the US they resumed them in the 1950s. They were still lynching black people into the 1960s; admittedly they’ve moved on. The police now permit you a count of ten before opening fire.

The Bible Belt isn’t just in the south amidst banjos and dungarees and battered hats. Mr Trump is endorsed by mainstream churches who seem to think that being anti-abortion confers a licence to kill and inflict suffering in other circumstances. And when the current leader of the worldwide Catholic Church reminds his members of this uncomfortable truth, Steve Bannon, self-appointed Trump evangelist, is duly despatched to silence him by whispering in the ear of prelates who have themselves become too fond of the trappings of earthly power

Does anyone really think that this country is ready to elect a socialist like ‘Sleepy’ Joe Biden who seeks to become Mr Trump’s nemesis? America’s party of the ‘Left' is nothing of the sort and any pretences in that direction are soon swamped by the realities of power; of the need to bow to the gun lobby and corporatism and where a well-placed claim of Communist! or Islamist! is sufficient to sew fear and loathing. Mr Trump has the moral advantage of at least not pretending that he is anything other than he is: the true representative of a deeply uncivilised country that has always worshipped money and power at the end of a gun.

Next month, America and those of us who still want to wish this country and its people well will mark the 18th anniversary of 9/11. In the weeks that followed the New York attacks America revived the heroism, mercy and self-sacrifice to which its Bill of Rights has always aspired. An opportunity to forge a new path seemed to be presenting itself. And then, just as suddenly as it emerged, it was extinguished by the need for vengeance. Evil was turned into a business opportunity and the wretched cycle of perpetual war begetting perpetual profit begetting perpetual war resumed.

Yet, the stir of sacred echoes from the days of 9/11 occurred in a Washington sub-committee chamber in June as the comedian and broadcaster Jon Stewart, his voice trembling with flinty compassion, persuaded his Government to ensure that the September 11 Victims Compensation Fund does not run out of money. Donald Trump will be tempted to weaponise the atrocity of 9/11, as he has weaponised all else. Mr Stewart’s righteous anger provided a glimmer of hope though, that this country may yet come to its senses and overthrow the man who imperils it and the world.