Donald Trump’s campaign may be over, but there will be violence before this presidential race ends

Trump’s candidacy may fail to make him Commander-in-Chief, but it has succeeded in making him Supreme Commander of a ragtag army of parallel universe-dwellers

Whether or not the Republican presidential nominee has a chance at winning the election, he’s still managed to amass steadfast followers (Reuters)

On the eve of the final presidential debate, the Trump infinity helix of dystopian horror takes another downward twist. But before we come to that, the good news. Assuming US opinion pollsters are better than ours (not a high hurdle), Donald Trump will not acquire the capacity to wage thermonuclear war.

Technically, it isn’t over. Perhaps WikiLeaks has a more lethal weapon in its arsenal of Clinton-related emails than those yet released (embarrassing though some are). Or maybe Hillary will use tomorrow’s debate to confess to the murders of Vince Foster, JFK and Bambi’s mother.

But, barring something epic, the outcome is obvious enough to have penetrated the peasouper fog of delusion and derangement that passes for Trump’s mind. Effectively throwing in the towel, he has taken to thinking out loud about his post-election plans, which may go beyond immediately inciting the fan base to violence.

It will be a big surprise if no one is shot on or before 8 November by someone in a “Lock Her Up” T-shirt. After election day, with Trump and such revolting surrogates as Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani force-feeding the rubes their strychnine candyfloss about electoral fraud, it will be a miracle.

When Mitt Romney was soundly beaten in 2012, Trump machine-gun tweeted about what he claimed to regard as a stolen election. “He lost the popular vote by a lot,” he wrote of Obama (who won the popular vote by almost four per cent). Another tweet went: “Let’s fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! The world is laughing at us”.

If that was his response to the defeat of a Republican candidate for whom he had contempt, imagine his reaction when the person he loves most in the world loses to a woman. And not any woman; a woman who lacks stamina, belongs on a chain gang and failed to impress him with her rear view when he did his Jaws act during the second debate.

All the uncertainty concerns not whether Trump will make a gracious concession speech, but whether he will concede at all. If not – if in the early hours of 9 November he informs his tens of millions of voters that they’ve been cheated out of their rightful President, implicitly by black electoral fraudsters, as he is already warning – one must assume that people will die.

What proportion of Trump supporters is crazy enough to interpret sour grapes of the kind as a call to arms – specifically, as an invitation to visit the nearest inner city (in TrumpWorld, “inner city” is the new n-word) and shoot someone they suspect has voted multiply – is unknowable. But it will be many, many times higher than the proportion of voters who actually commit ballot fraud, which is so minuscule as to be virtually non-existent.

While Trump’s candidacy will fail to make him Commander-in-Chief, it has succeeded in making him Supreme Commander of an enormous ragtag army of parallel universe-dwellers.

We can gauge its size from the poll finding that 71 per cent of Republicans believe this election will be stolen. That equates to some 40 million Americans. If one in 10,000 of these fantasists is provoked by more of his talk of “revolution”, that means 4,000 maniacs with firearms looking for revenge. In a far less febrile atmosphere, it took one maniac to shoot the Democratic congresswoman Gabby Giffords in the head (as it took one to kill Jo Cox here).

And so, lest this prospect of low level civil war isn’t hideous enough, to that fresh dystopian development: as rumoured, Donald Trump is thinking of starting a TV network. To this end, a son-in-law has talked with an investment bank specialising in funding media start-ups.

One appreciates the logic of Trump TV. Many Trump fans have concluded, especially since the departure of his enchanting adviser and fellow alleged groper Roger Ailes, that Fox News is no longer “fair and balanced” but another outpost of the lying mainstream media which would be rigging the election if it wasn’t about to stolen by African Americans and the deceased.

The resulting gap in the market may offer a chance to cash in on the tragically bemused who believe Obama is a Muslim, Sharia law is imminent from coast to shining coast, Hillary Clinton is a dying demonic lesbian serial killer, “black” is a synonym for “criminal”, America is about to fall under the dominion of a fascist/communist New World Order, and much more besides taken verbatim from the Cuckoo’s Nest Compendium of Conspiracy Theory. Trump TV might appeal as the conduit for a kind of shadow presidency, allowing him to directly address the faithful about the Clinton regime’s wickedness from a mocked-up Oval Office.

None of this, of course, may come to pass. Trump might decide that the start-up costs are too big and the projected revenues too small, and abandon the idea. He may even think better of declaring war on 9 November, conceding the election with whatever grace (ha ha ha) he can muster and retreating to Trump Tower to live out his life in isolation like Charles Foster Kane at Xanadu.

You wouldn’t bet on it, though.

In his guise as a cut price Dr Evil, leading a huge army of dangerous irregulars, he seems determined to weaken the foundation stone of democracy that is faith in the electoral system. He has pushed America to the ledge above what Dante might have settled on as his tenth circle of hell had he been a 21st century political analyst. We’ll discover in a few weeks if he means to give it one last, decisive shove.