“Like Nixon, Trump is bereft of personal morality, caring only to climb up the castle wall of political favour hand over hand, not realising that we journalists have tended the poisoned ivy that supports him,” writes The Gadfly columnist ROBERT MACKLIN. 

You have probably figured this out already, but all journalists, from the most celebrated editor and columnist to the humblest first-year cadet, every single one of us, loves Donald J Trump. Adores him. Can’t get enough of him. 

And why? Because you can’t either. 

Together, we made him. And what a superb creation he is. From the garish orange hair to the shiny blue suit, the expanding belly and the long red tie reaching down to his tackle, he’s the Trump that keeps on trumping.

What’s more, I promise you – the best is yet to come. 

We did it once before, a couple of generations ago, with the creation of “Tricky Dicky Nixon”. That was a long-term project that didn’t start paying off until his second dash for the presidency in the late 1960s. Sure, there was the delicious implosion after his run to be governor of California in 1962 when he held his “last press conference” and threatened that we “wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around any more”.

We had a good chuckle at that one. We let him stew for a while in a New York law firm. But with the departure of JFK and Lyndon B Johnson, we brushed him off and set him in pursuit of the Oval Office once more. When he reached it, he really paid off in spades. 

Watergate was a brilliant dénouement, not just for the grubby characters it threw into the limelight – scoundrels such as John Dean, Gordon Liddy, Bob Halderman and Mark Felt who played the role of “Deep Throat” – but the young journos Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward who gradually exposed it and forced him out of office in 1974.

We sold more papers and more TV views than ever before. You lapped it up. It elevated The Washington Post to the highest reaches of journalism and gave the entire industry a glow of satisfaction. Indeed, it made our craft seem almost respectable. It didn’t matter that Richard Milhous Nixon was really no worse than 90 per cent of the characters who ran for the top job. He was a family man, a foreign affairs expert and, until those “final days”, a sober, well-read bloke. But he looked the part of the villain that we made of him, and we kept the pressure on till he broke completely.

Exactly half a century on, the Donald Trump story has had a different flavour, though there are some similarities. 

Like Nixon, Trump is bereft of personal morality, caring only to climb up the castle wall of political favour hand over hand, not realising that we journalists have tended the poisoned ivy that supports him. 

Indeed, we selected him back in 2016 as Nixon’s successor the moment he showed his ruthless hatred of anyone seeking to beat him to the next level of public office.

His grasp of foreign affairs might be confined to the relative charms of Miss World contestants in (or out of) their skimpy bathing suits. He can’t spell “infrastructure”; he can’t even pronounce “statistics”, though he does have a coyote’s cunning in picking nasty labels for his opponents: “Sleepy Joe”, “Crooked Hillary”, “Low-Energy Jeb”, “Ron DeSanctus”, “Crazy Bernie”.

And he loves the sound of his own voice.

That’s what will carry him through to November 5, provided some gun-happy dingbat doesn’t get him in his cross-hairs. But will he really trump an opponent whose only fault seems to be that he’s still in the political game at 81 years?

I hope not. That would be carrying the joke one step too far. Obviously, we gave it a go in 2016 and got away with it… just before he did something really silly like disband NATO. We can’t risk that again. 

Or can we? 

Stay tuned… you know you will.

robert@robertmacklin.com