You should take Roger Stone seriously – without him there would be no President Trump

He is both the poster boy for, and one of the architects of, the descent of Republican politics into the hellscape of corruption that has found its nadir in the current presidency

An American commentator once called Roger Stone – the latest dangerous Trumpworld stalwart to face a long stretch inside – “the sinister Forrest Gump of American politics”.

Fictional characters cannot sue for defamation, for various compelling reasons. But if they could, even the ineffably stoical Gump might have a go after Stone’s comments about his recent arrest.

If the name of this stupendously peculiar figure rings no more than the faintest bell, I beg you to watch the gruesomely riveting 2007 documentary Get Me Roger Stone on Netflix. The official advice is to spend every moment of the 92 minutes in the most scalding shower you can tolerate, though that won’t entirely wash away the sense of contamination. For that, you’d need the nuclear power plant medical team that scrubbed Meryl Streep until her skin was red raw after she set off the radiation detectors in Silkwood.

However indelibly filthied we may feel, those of us who have seen the film were prepared for Stone’s reaction to being nicked by the Feds, for various Russian collusion-connected suspected offences, in the early hours of Friday. This he described yesterday as “unconscionable” – and not just because it “terrorised” his wife and dogs. It also involved “greater force than was used,” he said, “ to take down bin Laden or El Chapo or Pablo Escobar.”

Somewhere in that lies a hint of hyperbole.

Bin Laden was shot twice in the brain by navy Seals in Pakistan, preparatory to the tossing of his corpse into the Indian Ocean. El Chapo, aka Joaquim Guzman, was captured by the Mexican marines who killed five of his henchpeople during a raid they lit up with hand grenades. The force used to take down his fellow drug lord Escobar, in the Colombian cocaine stronghold of Medellin, featured a fatal bullet shot through an ear.

However insane Stone’s claim sounds, however demented he invariably appears, there may be some method in the madness: for four decades, he has (albeit without the sex crimes; a little light swinging seems the extent of his erotic individualism) been to Washington politics what Jimmy Savile once was to British entertainment.

Stone hasn’t exactly hidden in plain sight. Too much the narcissist to hide at all, he loves boasting about his mastery of the very darkest political arts. But his essential oddity operated as a smokescreen, cloaking his wickedness in a peaspouper of pantomime absurdity that protected him from being taken seriously.

Whatever comes from the seven charges to which he has pleaded not guilty today, he should be taken seriously. He is both the poster boy for, and one of the architects of, the descent of Republican politics into the hellscape of corruption that has found its nadir, for now, in Donald Trump.

Without Stone, some argue, there would no President Trump. It is 30 years since his friend and adviser first encouraged Trump to run for the White House. With a chilling prescience possibly beyond the Gumpian range, he sniffed the makings of a successful demagogue in someone barely less preposterous than himself.

Stone is the runt of Richard Nixon’s satanic litter. More conventional members of the brood, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, preferred to play down the connection. Stone, who wangled a job on the 1968 campaign, has a Nixon tattoo on his back and needs little persuasion to show it off.

When the swinging revelations had him ostracised from George W Bush’s godly White House, despite him instigating a mini riot outside a Miami courthouse during the Florida recount, Stone started a lobbying term with fellow indictee Paul Manafort and others. The speciality, obviously, was laundering the reputations of murderous dictators.

After patiently mining the recesses of Trump’s ego, he finally hit pay dirt in 2015 when his political creation decided to run. Precisely what Stone did to facilitate his election, beyond mothballing the bespoke suits during the campaign for a T-shirt featuring Bill Clinton’s face above the word “Rape”, may or may not be revealed.

It could be that he will be true to his original declaration (though his subsequent remarks seem ambiguous) that he will go to his grave without turning rat. But if the pardon doesn’t seem imminent, the 66-year-old might see the prospect of celebrating his 80th in a penitentiary as reason to revisit that solemn oath.

In a sense it matters little either way, or less at least than the stark fact that such a creature was allowed to operate in plain sight at the epicentre of global power, and perhaps shape global history.

Finally, as with Trump himself, it must be dawning on Roger Stone that the mores of reality television and real politics aren’t quite the same. The outlandish showmanship and grotesque amorality that is the lifeblood of the former is a virulent infection in the latter’s bloodstream. Belatedly, the immune system of the US political system is fighting back – and with a ferocity unimaginable in sclerotic old Britain, where the police quickly concluded that investigating Russian involvement in the Brexit campaign was none of their beeswax.

But this is not an illness that can be cured, or even suppressed for very long. Roger Stone isn’t the disease. Nor is Trump.

They are the symptoms of the diseased relationship between money, power and elements of the media for which, unlike Bin Laden, there is no magic bullet.