I would rather eat worms than write about the current hullabaloo on the American right over the conspiracy theories about paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his various pals and accomplices. The temptation is just to sit back and enjoy watching the MAGA revolution devour its own children, but Duty calls.

It is not enough just to wish that both sides lose. (Well, all of the many sides, really.) It is becoming clear that this scandal will probably injure Donald Trump personally and weaken him permanently. It doesn’t matter whether he was really implicated in Epstein’s crimes or not. As usual, it’s the attempted cover-up that does the damage.

Nobody outside the United States has any influence on how the political storm that is growing there comes out, but everybody has a stake in the outcome. Even an increasingly isolationist America that is descending into political chaos is still the world’s greatest military power and a major economic player. What happens there matters, but what should we hope for?

The first principle is that we should all work to ensure that Trump remains in office for the remaining 42 months of his four-year term. He would only leave voluntarily if his entanglement in the Epstein affair grows so damning that he has to resign in order to be pardoned by his successor, President J.D. Vance, but that is not out of the question.

The great virtue of Trump as candidate for the role of first American dictator is that he’s not up to the job. The push towards a ‘soft fascist’ authoritarian system is real and quite rapid – the ever-growing ICE is emerging as his private army – but his instinctive preference for a state of chaos that maximises his options is not a sound foundation for a lasting dictatorship.

Another three-and-a-half-years of Trump freed from all the restraints that the ‘grown-ups’ put on him during his first term will probably do great damage to the US economy. However, it would also make it unlikely that either a chosen successor (or Trump himself in defiance of the Constitution) could win the presidency in 2028.

Democracy in the United States can survive Donald Trump, and not just as a Hungarian-style ‘elective dictatorship’. The number of people who swallow all the lies is shocking and shaming, but they never exceed half the population. A democratic comeback is possible.

On the other hand democracy in the United States would probably not survive a ‘President’ Vance who took power long enough before the 2028 election – whether by succession to a physically incapacitated or criminally implicated Trump or simply by a putsch – to rig the vote.

Just look at him. You know it’s true. So put up with Trump. Within limits, of course.

The limits would include any US invasion of a near-neighbour (Greenland, Panama, Canada), but the rest of the world has tacitly accepted US air-strikes on at least half-a-dozen distant countries in recent decades. Now is not the right time to get picky about it.

Nobody should condone the slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, but almost none of the other traditional democracies on the ‘West’ openly condemn it either.

And don’t get upset if Trump flips and flops a few more times on arms aid to Ukraine. That’s who he is, and if you prefer him to the alternative then just make sure everybody else in the West buys enough arms from the US to keep the Ukrainians supplied. Trump just wants to be paid for them.

And what about the impact on world trade of Trump’s ceaseless tampering with tariffs? This is a self-healing wound, in the sense that a rapidly growing number of countries are concluding that the United States is not a reliable trading partner. The endless struggle to keep up with the changes is just not worth it.                                                       

The likely outcome is that supply chains will increasingly go around the United States rather than to or through it. That’s not a limitless disaster for the United States, just a handicap that can be repaired in time.

The arrival of Trump 2.0 has been a shock to both the global trading system and the alliance structures that had prevailed since the 1950s, but they are adjusting fast and fairly well to the new realities. Or at least, it could have been a lot worse.

It could still take a turn for the worse, of course, but that’s always the case. The task when things are threatening to fall apart is always to decide what is really important to preserve, and make your other choices and goals serve that overriding objective. Right now, that means keeping J.D. Vance from the throne, even at the cost of putting up with Trump.

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Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers’.  The previous book, ‘The Shortest History of War’, is also still available.