Who sleeps better at night – Barack Obama or David Cameron?

John Rentoul wonders who is more horrified as they contemplate the ruin of what they thought they had achieved

I suspect that it is Obama who is more tortured by the trashing of so much of what he stood for (Getty)

Donald Trump’s latest provocation prompts us once again to wonder what Barack Obama makes of his successor. The current president is like an art performance, designed to stoke the deepest fears of mild-mannered, right-thinking liberals for whom Obama was the Platonic ideal of a leader.

Now Trump has suggested that he’d like to postpone the election, with entirely predictable results. He doesn’t have the power to do so, even under emergency legislation, and he doesn’t have the majorities he needs in Congress to change the law, but he knows what will send elite liberals into a meltdown.

He did the same with his response to the conspiracy theory that he would refuse to accept the result of the election if Joe Biden won in November. By failing to say he would accept the result, he pressed the same big red button. Even if he could, for example, persuade Republican state legislatures to refuse to certify the results in their states, he could not prevent the electoral college from meeting, and the constitution requires a president to be inaugurated in January. If he loses the election by a clear margin, that is not going to be him.