The Dawson’s Creek star James Van Der Beek has revealed he has been diagnosed with bowel cancer.

Despite the diagnosis, the 47-year-old said there was “reason for optimism” and that he was “feeling good” as he made the announcement in an interview with the US outlet People.

The star made his name playing Dawson Leery in the US teen drama series from 1998 to 2003 and is due to appear in a US Fox special called The Real Full Monty, which is based on the 1997 British film and will see a group of male celebrities strip down to raise awareness for cancer awareness and research.

He told People: “I have colorectal cancer, I’ve been privately dealing with this diagnosis and have been taking steps to resolve it, with the support of my incredible family. There’s reason for optimism, and I’m feeling good.”

The Connecticut actor has continued to work, appearing in an episode of Walker, the reboot of Walker, Texas Ranger, on the US network The CW, and will appear in Sidelined: The QB And Me, a Tubi original film which will be released on 29 November.

He told People he had been prioritising time with his wife, Kimberly Van Der Beek, and their children Olivia, Joshua, Annabel, Emilia, Gwendolyn and Jeremiah.

Van Der Beek is also known for his roles as a fictional version of himself in Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, in CSI: Cyber as the FBI agent Elijah Mundo, and as Matt Bromley in the first season of the FX drama Pose.

Bowel cancer can develop in the rectum or colon and is one of the most common types of cancer in many parts of the world. It is sometimes known as colorectal cancer because it affects the large bowel, which includes the colon and rectum. Symptoms include pain in the rectum or anus, a change in appearance or shape of faeces, blood or mucus in the stool, unexplained anaemia or a change in normal bowel habits.

“As Republicans, we are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

The startling comment came from a mother of five and grandmother of two, Vikki Westbrook, as she lined up on Sunday outside an aircraft hangar in rural North Carolina. She had come to hear Donald Trump make one of his last pitches of the 2024 presidential election.

Westbrook, 55, wasn’t entirely joking with her “locked and loaded” remark. Nor was she being entirely frivolous.

She does own guns, she said, though she wouldn’t specify how many.

Personally, she intended to avoid any trouble that might erupt in the wake of Tuesday’s election, she said. “I have kids, I can’t afford to go to prison. And I don’t like orange.”

It’s her fellow Make America Great Again (Maga) supporters whom she fears might be tempted to take action should the former president lose the election. “At this point, a lot of Republicans aren’t going to take it any longer. They won’t let the election be stolen from us twice.”

Westbrook remains convinced that the 2020 presidential election was snatched from Trump. Now she is equally certain that should Kamala Harris win on Tuesday, it will be for one reason only.

“Only if they cheat. I’m absolutely positive of that.”

Trump has been studiously nurturing such passions for years, his rhetoric rising in intensity in recent days. He has repeatedly refused to confirm that he will accept the results of the vote count, and earlier on Sunday he told supporters in Pennsylvania that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House four years ago.

A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute recorded that one in four Republican Trump supporters believe that were Trump to lose the election, he should declare the results invalid and do “whatever it takes” to retake the White House. That’s a sobering finding, but a grossly understated one, judging from the mood at Trump’s Kinston rally.

“People will riot if Trump doesn’t win,” said Cedric Perness, 38, an African American Trump supporter. He said it would be too dangerous for him to participate in any post-election unrest – “I’d get killed right there.”

Instead he does what he can, he said, to help Trump by selling merchandise on his campaign’s behalf. He has a stall of hats and T-shirts, some saying: “You missed bitches. Two times!”

In the final stages of the 2024 race, Trump has been whipping up the passions of his millions of devoted followers to a fever pitch. In the last three days of campaigning alone he has made four stops in North Carolina, a battleground state which the Democrats have won only twice since Jimmy Carter in 1976 (the other time being Barack Obama in 2008).

Trump must hold North Carolina to have a clear shot at returning to the White House.

In these frantic last hours, he has pursued a two-pronged strategy to fire up his followers. On the one hand, he has been raising their expectations by claiming that he is well ahead in the polls.

“We’re going to have on Tuesday a landslide that’s too big to rig,” a tired and hoarse-sounding Trump told the Kinston crowd. “We have a big lead. We have a big lead. The fake news, they don’t tell you this. We have a big, beautiful lead.”

In fact, poll trackers suggest that he and Harris remain neck-and-neck in North Carolina and the other six critical swing states.

On the other hand, Trump has also been laying the foundations of a renewed conspiracy, should he need it, to subvert the election results by alleging widespread fraud. He touted the false accusation at the Kinston rally that Democrats are enabling non-citizens to vote in vast numbers, accusing the Biden administration of pursuing an open-border policy on the southern border with Mexico “maybe [because they] want to put them on the voting rolls. That’s probably the reason.”

Supporters at the rally faithfully parroted the lie on Sunday.

“That’s why they opened the border, to allow all the illegals in so they could vote for Democrats,” said a woman in the line who declined to give her name. “There’s always been corruption in this country, but I had no idea it was this bad. America has been run into the ground – anyone with half a brain can see that.”

Almost as pervasive as the supporters’ belief in the demonic intentions of Democrats was their frustration at what they could do about it. Last time around, such toxic emotions culminated in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

The Kinston rally goers, following Trump’s lead, universally dismissed January 6 as a “set up” in which peaceful and patriotic Americans were lured into a dastardly deep-state trap. Westbrook, the “locked and loaded” grandmother, admitted to having been present at the Capitol that day.

Hundreds of Trump supporters, driven to distraction by the then president’s “stop the steal” rhetoric, stormed the heart of American democracy on that day. In the violent clashes that ensued, approximately 140 police officers were assaulted.

That’s not how Westbrook sees it. “It wasn’t what they said happened. The only people causing trouble were antifa, they were put into us to cause problems.”

This is a lot for any American voter to be carrying. The 2020 election was stolen from her candidate of choice, she firmly believes, and now she’s worried that Tuesday could see a repeat performance.

“Four years ago I felt angry, very angry. This time I will be even more angry.”

Should her worst fears come to pass, and Trump lose, where will all that powerful emotion go?

“If he loses, I’m scared,” the grandmother said.

Donald Trump said with two days until the presidential election that he should never have left the White House after his defeat in 2020 and joked darkly he would be fine with reporters getting shot, dredging up grievances that overshadowed his attack lines against Kamala Harris.

The closing themes of the former president’s campaign at a rally in Lititz in the battleground state of Pennsylvania brought him full circle with his 2016 campaign that went after the news media and his 2020 campaign that was defined by his attempts to overturn the result.

Trump stayed on message for the first part of his remarks but could not resist reverting to resentments he has held on to for years, describing Democrats as demonic and lamenting about the 2020 election that polls badly and his aides thought they had convinced him to let go.

“We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said. “I shouldn’t have left, I mean honestly, we did so well, we had such a great – ” he said before abruptly cutting himself off.

The remark reflected what Trump told aides and allies in the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat, a loss he has never conceded, and how he sat in at least one meeting at the end of his first term where he mused about refusing to leave the White House, a person familiar with the matter said.

Trump at one point also praised himself for going-off script, a startling moment that reflects how he has become increasingly uninhibited, perhaps as the fatigue of doing multiple rallies a day has inexorably taken its toll.

Once Trump started on the 2020 election, he could not stop. He revived debunked conspiracy theories from 2020 and suggested anew that voting machines would be hacked, and efforts to extend polling hours in Pennsylvania – what his own team has pushed for – amounted to fraud.

Trump also spent time at the rally lashing out at a series of recent polls, notably a Des Moines Register poll in Iowa that put him four points behind Harris in the state of Iowa. Harris is universally not expected to win Iowa, but it could be indicative of her momentum in the final days.

“You really do inflict damage, like you do with this person in Iowa,” Trump said of the Selzer poll done for the Des Moines Register on Saturday. “It is called suppression. They suppress. And it actually should be illegal.”

The Guardian has reported that Trump’s aides are bullish on his chances, even though they concede they have no real idea how must-win states like Pennsylvania will break on election day. Part of the confidence is coming from internal polls that has Trump possibly winning five out of seven battlegrounds.

The trail of grievances extended to reviving an old favorite that he debuted when he was in office: castigating the news media and suggesting that he would have no concerns about reporters being shot at if there were another assassination attempt against him.

“To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through fake news, and I don’t mind that much, because, I don’t mind. I don’t mind,” Trump said from behind panes of bulletproof glass, as some supporters in the crowd laughed and jeered.

Hours after the rally, as Trump traveled to Kinston, North Carolina, for his second of three campaign stops of the day, Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung claimed in a statement that the comments were supposedly an effort to look out for the welfare of the news media.

“President Trump was brilliantly talking about the two assassination attempts on his own life, including one that came within 1/4 of an inch from killing him, something that the media constantly talks and jokes about,” the statement said.

“President Trump was stating that the media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also. There can be no other interpretation of what was said,” it said.

Donald Trump has passionately disputed a shock Iowa poll that found Kamala Harris leading the former president in the typically red state 47% to 44%.

“No President has done more for FARMERS, and the Great State of Iowa, than Donald J. Trump,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network on Sunday morning. “In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT.”

Trump continued, in all caps: “I love the farmers, and they love me. And they trust me.” More than 85% of Iowa’s land is used for farming and it produces more corn, pigs, eggs, ethanol and biodiesel than any other state.

On Saturday, the Selzer poll carried out for the Des Moines Register newspaper showed the vice-president ahead of her Republican rival by three points. Selzer is a widely respected polling organisation with a good record in Iowa; she shot to polling fame in 2008 when she predicted that a virtually unknown senator, Barack Obama, would beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses.

If Harris were even competitive in Iowa – which Trump won in both 2016 and 2020 – it could radically reshape the race.

The pollster told MSNBC on Sunday that Harris was leading in early voting in Iowa “because of her strength with women generally, even stronger with women aged 65 and older. Her margin is more than 2-to-1 – and this is an age group that shows up to vote or votes early in disproportionately large numbers.”

Earlier on Sunday, Trump’s campaign released a memo from its chief pollster and its chief data consultant calling the Des Moines Register poll “a clear outlier” and saying that an Emerson College poll – also released Saturday – more closely reflected the state of the Iowa electorate.

The Emerson poll found 53% of likely voters support Trump and 43% support Harris, with 3% undecided and 1% planning to vote for a third-party candidate.

The Trump campaign, which many Democrats believe is setting the stage for a series of legal challenges to poll results, also said in an email that the Des Moines Register poll and a subsequent New York Times swing state poll that found Harris ahead in four of the seven states, is “being used to drive a voter suppression narrative against President Trump’s supporters.

“Some in the media are choosing to amplify a mad dash to dampen and diminish voter enthusiasm,” the statement added.

Last week, Trump said: “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before” but did not provide evidence for the claim. A Harris campaign official said that the “cheating” claim was an example of how Trump was trying to sow doubt in the electoral system because he was afraid he would lose.

The claims come as a federal judge plans to rule on whether Iowa officials can continuing trying to remove hundreds of potential noncitizens from its voting rolls despite critics saying the effort could keep recently naturalized citizens from voting.

North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, a Republican, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he is confident that Trump is “going to confidently win Iowa”.

Asked if Trump has a problem winning over women voters, Burgum said: “I’d be surprised, completely shocked if that comes anywhere close to being the fact in Iowa.”

Burgum pointed to national polling which shows Harris and Trump tied.

“I think that’s the feeling that I get on the ground. It’s a very tight race. It’s going to be decided on Tuesday,” Burgum added.

But speaking to MSNBC, Maryland governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, said the Des Moines Register poll putting Harris ahead Iowa, but still within margins of error, “lines up with what we’re seeing on the ground”, particularly among women voters.

Moore continued: “We’re watching an energy that I think has not been there for a while, where we continue to see where women understand firsthand, what is at stake, that they understand the dynamics and the distinctions between these two candidates literally could not be more stark about when you’re talking about a future vision for the country.”

On election day, Florida voters will decide whether to enshrine a constitutional right to hunt and fish in their state.

Amendment 2, proposed by Republican state lawmaker Lauren Melo, seeks to “preserve traditional methods, as a public right and preferred means of responsibly managing and controlling fish and wildlife”.

Much is at stake. If the amendment succeeds, hunting and fishing would be considered the primary – and legally protected – conservation methods in Florida. Both activities are a huge part of the state’s multibillion-dollar recreational tourism economy. As of 30 October, backers of amendment 2 had raised nearly $1.3m for the measure, far out-fundraising the amendment’s opponents.

Lawyers, scientists and conservationists worry amendment 2’s vague language, particularly the passage about “traditional methods”, could supersede science-based wildlife management in unprecedented ways.

“That language is open to applying chicanery,” said David Guest, a retired Earthjustice lawyer based in Florida. “Does that mean that you can use explosives [in the destructive practice called “blast fishing”]? I mean, what in the world is this?”

Pushed by conservative-leaning organizations such as the National Rifle Association and the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation (CSF), these “sportsmen’s bills of rights” view hunting as a cultural tradition and are meant to counter proposals to limit hunting and fishing.

“It’s a pre-emptive safeguard against the anti-sportsman agenda,” said Mark Lance, CSF’s south-eastern states senior director. The CSF and the the NRA apply that term to what they consider extremist animal-rights campaigns to end all hunting, epitomized by former Humane Society CEO Wayne Pacelle’s leadership.

The CSF drafted language for many of the measures nationwide, including Florida’s, along with the International Order of T Roosevelt, a hunting advocacy group named after the former president and hunting enthusiast Theodore Roosevelt. The CSF is also fighting a Colorado proposal that would eliminate hunting for mountain lions.

These campaigns to change constitutions have been effective at ballot boxes around the nation. Florida could become the 24th state and the last in the south-east to add hunting and fishing rights to its constitution. While Vermont was long the only state to constitutionally protect hunting and fishing rights – it did so for more than 200 years – these measures proliferated after Alabama residents approved one in 1996. To date, only one has failed, in Arizona. But in Guest’s analysis, “this is the one that’s the sloppiest” of other recent measures in states like North Carolina and Utah.

Guest and Sierra Club Florida chapter director Susannah Randolph both told the Guardian that the amendment’s nebulous language, particularly the “traditional methods” part, could harm wildlife populations and conservation efforts. There is no legal definition of traditional methods in court, Guest said. Nor is it defined in the amendment.

Advocates say this vagueness might enable worst-case-scenario possibilities, including use of steel-jaw leghold traps, which are considered cruel and outlawed in more than 100 countries; using hounds to hunt bears and other game, which is banned or restricted in several states; and more relaxed killing limits. A Florida Bar analysis also suggests that organized hunts are likely to become more common if the amendment passes. Others worry amendment 2 would backpedal on Florida’s 1995 gillnet ban, a constitutional amendment that outlawed commercial fishing nets that entangle marine mammals such as dolphins. Despite this concern, amendment 2 cannot repeal or impede the gillnet ban, Guest said, because both amendments can be applied in tandem.

But it’s unclear how courts could interpret such language. Guest pointed out that, in Wisconsin, the constitutional right to hunt and fish was upheld to support wolf hunting after the species was delisted from the Endangered Species Act. Florida wildlife advocates fear the same reasoning would apply to the black bear. On the other hand, Ryan Byrne, a managing editor at the nonpartisan website Ballotpedia, noted that courts have decided states can still regulate hunting and fishing in previous lawsuits.

Still, some Florida conservationists and activists think that amendment 2 could empower individuals to do what they please and ignore existing regulations. While the amendment does reiterate the authority of the state wildlife-management agency, the Florida fish and wildlife conservation commission (FWC), the constitutional preference for hunting and fishing would mean there was no guarantee FWC’s authority would win out, said Devki Pancholi, a third-year University of Florida law student and vice-president of the local Animal Legal Defense Fund chapter. Courts will typically refer to the most recent amendment when resolving constitutional disputes.

The amendment’s vagueness is strategic. A CSF document distributed at a National Rifle Association convention and obtained by the NoTo 2.org campaign suggested that “by using a vague term like ‘traditional methods,’ it will be up to state agencies to determine what they include in their season as ‘traditional methods’”, such as trapping. The NRA’s lobbying arm has also published recommended language for state constitutional amendments to protect the right to hunt and fish.

Florida law already codifies hunting and fishing as statutory rights, which proponents of the constitutional measure argue can be easily reversed. Yet there have not been any significant attempts to outlaw hunting and fishing in the state.

“In order to change the statutory right to fish and hunt in Florida, you would need 61 House reps and 21 state senators to vote … to make hunting and fishing illegal,” said Chuck O’Neal, chair of the NoTo2.org political action committee. “It’s never going to happen, not in this state.” Melo and the state senator Jason Brodeur, the Republican lawmakers who introduced the bill in 2023, did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

Still, Lance, the CSF south-east regional senior director, argues that even without direct criminalization attempts in Florida, threats exist on a national scale. “We want to be ahead of attacks to hunting and fishing in Florida before it’s too late,” he said.

The bill’s supporters point to a failed 2021 Oregon ballot proposal that sought to redefine hunting and fishing as animal abuse as a leading example of nationwide threats.

“That’s a backhanded way to try to regulate hunting and fishing,” said Lane Stephens, a lobbyist who represents the Southeastern Dog Hunters Association, among others.

Stephens added that the attempt was aligned with the mission of the Humane Society, which contributed nearly $10,000 to the NoTo2.org campaign.

“We don’t want [animal-rights activists] trying to run something in our constitution or in state law that would limit our abilities to hunt and fish,” Stephens said, adding that many of Florida’s incoming urban residents don’t understand or agree with the hunting and fishing heritage Floridians enjoy.

He continued: “It’s up to FWC to decide when we have a season and what that season looks like.”

But Pancholi, the law student, and others question some of the procedures behind the measure getting on the ballot and FWC’s involvement with it. The bill was fast-tracked through the state legislature, O’Neal pointed out, with fewer hearings in the statehouse and senate than usual. And the FWC, which is responsible for regulating fish and wildlife, may be the measure’s most significant supporter.

In September, the FWC sent out a memo on official letterhead, written by chair Rodney Barreto. It directed those with questions about the amendment to a Yes on 2 campaign communications director. Barreto is also vice-chair of the Yes on 2 campaign and sits on the board of the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida, which contributed $250,000 to the Vote Yes on Amendment 2 political action committee. FWC commissioners Steven Hudson and Preston Farrior contributed $10,000 and $15,000, respectively, to the Yes on 2 campaign as well. Commissioners are gubernatorial appointees.

According to Florida law, government agencies are required to provide public notice in a public meeting before formally endorsing a ballot measure, but FWC did not hold public discussions about its position before announcing its support.

“From what I could tell, I wasn’t able to find any meeting notes,” Pancholi, the law student, said. Neither could the Guardian. If true, “that would be a violation of the law”, she added. FWC did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment by press time.

Conservation and science at odds

Yes on 2 supporters are united by a strong belief that hunters and anglers are the original conservationists.

“Hunting is a means of conservation by which animal populations remain under control,” said Stephens. “We need to make decisions based on the science and the data, and not on emotions.”

Yet scientists have argued that the amendment could do exactly the opposite, placing hunting and fishing higher than other management methods such as habitat restoration, raising vulnerable species in captivity for release, or “bag limits” that restrict the kind and number of animals people can kill or keep. Such an approach appears at odds with the basics of wildlife management, said Edward Camp, a professor of fisheries and aquaculture governance at the University of Florida.

“Does it influence how the best management advice is selected?” Camp said. “That’s, I think, at the heart of the issue.”

Amendment 2 may prioritize hunts as the solution to human-wildlife conflicts instead, pushing other scientific methods to the backseat. After a 2015 bear hunt killed nearly 300 bears over the span of just two days, for example, several Florida counties allocated money for bear-proof trash bins that helped reduce human-bear encounters.

Guest, the environmental lawyer, predicts that “the focus will be more on consumption of wildlife and less on conservation”.

Ballotpedia’s Byrne noted the widespread notion that ballot measures, regardless of topic, are sometimes “really just to stoke a cultural issue and try to affect turnout”.

With a much-publicized abortion measure also on the ballot in Florida and increasingly politicized judiciaries, Guest said the sportsmen’s bills of right are part of a national movement to advance the political agenda of the far right.

“The constitution is the social contract,” he said. “We should be more cautious in the way we write it.”

Thousands of blue-clad protesters have told the government to “stop poisoning Britain’s water” as they marched through London calling for action on the country’s contaminated coastal waters and rivers.

A coalition of more than 130 nature, environmental and water-sport organisations called supporters out on to the streets of the capital on Sunday afternoon, aiming to create the country’s biggest ever protest over water.

The broadcaster Chris Packham, the actor Jim Murray and Giles Bristow, the chief executive of the campaign group Surfers Against Sewage, led the march from the Albert Embankment in Vauxhall to Parliament Square, with banners reading: “Stop poisoning Britain’s waterways” and “Cut the crap, save our rivers”.

Behind them thousands of protesters clad in blue, many of them carrying the multicoloured flags of the climate activist movement Extinction Rebellion, followed dancing to samba bands and waving placards, most homemade.

Bristow said: “We’ve been campaigning for over 30 years – nearly 35 years, in fact – to end shit in our waters, because we are fed up of surfing, of swimming, of trying to enjoy our natural blue spaces but they’re being polluted in front of our eyes.

“So we’re joining in because it’s a march for clean water and we’re saying it’s time to cut the crap. We’ve got to get on, sort out this shit show.”

Charles Watson, the founder and director of the charity River Action, the lead organiser, said: “One of the key demands of this march is that this notion that it can be profitable to pollute has got to stop, that the laws have got to be enforced.

“And in order to enforce the laws, the bodies that are tasked to do that [have] got to be reformed, they’ve got to be taken to pieces and put back together again and most importantly they’ve got to be properly funded.”

The protest comes amid a crisis in the country’s water provision. Last year, raw sewage was discharged for more than 3.6m hours into rivers and seas by England’s water companies, a 105% increase on the previous 12 months. At the same time, mass deaths of fish in England’s rivers have increased almost tenfold since 2020.

The UN rapporteur for the right to clean water, Prof Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, last month singled out the privatised English water system for criticism, accusing the sector’s regulators of being ineffective and unaccountable.

Meanwhile, the water industry has extracted vast profits from customers, while saddling their companies with billions in debt. Last year, the Guardian revealed that more than a quarter of water bills in London and parts of the south of England have been spent paying the interest on the debt the companies hold.

Watson said: “The underlying cause of the problem is the fact the regulatory system that is there to enforce the law and hold polluters to account, has literally systemically failed.

“Ofwat, the water regulator, was supposed to be there to protect the environment, to protect customers from the privatised industry paying themselves too much. But they failed, over 70bn [pounds] of dividends has been stripped out of the industry, money that was desperately needed to be invested in making the system future-proof.”

The protest attracted huge numbers of supporters, affiliated to a diverse range of organisations including the National Federation of Women’s Institutes and the GMB union.

Melissa Green, the chief executive of the WI, said: “Our members have been calling for action against water pollution unbelievably since 1927. That was the first time we raised the alarm with government about the quality of the water in our communities, and then we raised it again in the 60s, again in the 80s, and again in 2023.

“Our message for government is you’ve got the regulation, you’ve got the regulators, you need to hold people to account. We know that our water is being polluted wantonly, knowingly, for profit, and we can’t understand why the government are not taking more action.”

Hundreds of people have heckled Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia, as well as the prime minister and the regional leader of Valencia – throwing mud and shouting “murderers” – as the group attempted an official visit to one of the municipalities hardest hit by the deadly floods.

The scenes playing out in Paiporta on Sunday laid bare the mounting sense of abandonment among the devastated areas and the lingering anger over why an alert urging residents not to leave home on Tuesday was sent after the flood waters began surging.

Much of the fury appeared to be directed at the elected officials, as calls rang out for the resignation of Pedro Sánchez, the country’s prime minister, and Carlos Mazón, Valencia’s regional leader.

Sánchez was swiftly evacuated as bodyguards used umbrellas to protect the group from the barrage of mud. “What were they hoping would come from this visit?” one furious local asked the newspaper El País. “People are very angry. Pedro Sánchez should have been here on day one with a shovel.”

The king insisted on continuing the visit, at one point meeting a man who wept on his shoulder. He was also confronted by a young man who told him that “you’ve abandoned us”, asking why residents had been left on their own to grapple with the aftermath of the deadly floods. “You’re four days too late,” he told the king.

The man also challenged the king on why the civil protection service, which is overseen by the regional government, had sent the alert hours after the state-run weather agency had warned of deteriorating conditions. “They knew it, they knew it, and yet they did nothing,” he shouted at the monarch. “It’s a disgrace.”

Spain’s royal palace later said that the king’s plans to visit a second hard-hit town in the region had been postponed.

The public rage came as the death toll from the floods climbed to 217. As the meteorological agency on Sunday again issued a red alert, forecasting further heavy rain in the area, mayors from the affected municipalities pleaded with officials to send help.

“We’re very angry and we’re devastated,” said Guillermo Luján, the mayor of Aldaia. “We have a town in ruins. We need to start over and I’m begging for help. Please help us.”

The town’s 33,000 residents were among many in the region grappling with the aftermath of the ferocious floods that rank as the deadliest in Spain’s modern history. The number of people missing remains unknown.

Luján said his town was in desperate need of heavy machinery to clear out the vehicles and debris piled up along the streets.

The municipality had yet to confirm the extent of the devastation, leaving Luján bracing for the worst. Aldaia has one of the region’s most visited shopping centres, with a vast underground car park that on Tuesday filled with water in a matter of minutes.

“Right now, the upper part of the centre is devastated and the lower level is a terrifying unknown,” Luján told broadcaster RTVE. “We don’t know what we’re going to find. We want to be cautious, but we’ll see. It might be heartbreaking.”

In Paiporta, the mayor, Maribel Albalat, described the situation as desperate. Days after the town’s ravine overflowed, unleashing a deluge of water that wreaked havoc on the 29,000 inhabitants, parts of the town remain inaccessible, she said. “It’s impossible because there are bodies, there are vehicles with bodies and these have to be removed,” she told the news agency Europa Press. “Everything is very difficult.”

Albalat said the number of deaths had climbed to 70 in the small town and was expected to climb in the coming days, as access was secured to underground garages. On Tuesday, in the absence of any sign that this storm would be different from any other, many residents had gone down to their garages to move their cars to higher ground.

In flooded towns such as Alfafar and Sedaví, mayors described feeling abandoned by officials as residents scrambled to shovel mud from their homes and clear streets. In some areas, residents were still trying to secure electricity supply or stable phone service.

On Friday, the catastrophic images emanating from these municipalities coalesced into a show of solidarity, as thousands of volunteers from lesser-affected areas trekked to the hardest-hit areas carrying shovels, brooms and food supplies. On Saturday, thousands more turned up at Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences, which had been hastily converted into the nerve centre of the clean-up operation.

The mayor of Chiva, where on Tuesday nearly a year’s worth of rain fell in eight hours, said the situation was a “rollercoaster” for the 17,000 residents.

“You see sadness, which is logical given that we’ve lost our town,” Amparo Fort told reporters. “But on the other hand, it’s heartening to see the response that we’ve had from everyone … there is a real, human wave of volunteers, particularly young people.”

Sánchez said 10,000 troops and police would be deployed to help with what he described as “the worst flood our continent has seen so far this century”.

He acknowledged that help had been slow in reaching where it was most needed. “I’m aware that the response we’re mounting isn’t enough. I know that,” he said. “And I know there are severe problems and shortages and that there are still collapsed services and towns buried by the mud where people are desperately looking for their relatives, and people who can’t get into their homes, and houses that have been buried or destroyed by mud. I know we have to do better and give it our all.”

Scientists say the human-driven climate crisis is increasing the length, frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. The warming of the Mediterranean, which increases water evaporation, plays a key role in making torrential rains more severe, experts have also said.

When Coen van den Bighelaar first spoke to school friends about taking over their parents’ dairy farms, he was the only one of the four to voice serious doubts. Fresh out of university, he was making more money in a comfortable office than his father did toiling for twice as long in the field.

But six years later, Bighelaar has followed in his parents’ footsteps, while his friends’ enthusiasm has waned. One quit farming to take a job in logistics. Another opened a daycare centre to supplement the income from selling milk. A third is thinking about buying land and moving to Canada.

“It’s really hard,” says Bighelaar, a fourth-generation dairy farmer in the Netherlands who feels a mix of hope and fear about the future. “A lot of young farmers quit because they don’t see any perspective.”

Thousands of small and medium-sized farms in Europe shut up shop each year, unable to survive from selling food at the dirt-cheap prices that big competitors offer. The brutal economic situation has inflicted misery on farmers who struggle to turn a profit and forced some to give up or look for alternative streams of revenue.

Małgorzata Maj, who runs a guest house on her parents’ 20-hectare sheep farm in south-west Poland, says most of her income now comes from tourists. The profit margins on sheep are so small that “we wouldn’t be able to survive” without guests, she says.

The average income on European farms is rising but so, too, is the earnings gap between the biggest and smallest farms, a Guardian analysis of pay data found on Friday. Agricultural economists say the death of small farms is being driven by economies of scale and leaps in technology that big farms are more able to embrace. They can spread capital costs such as large tractors and milking robots over more crops and animals, allowing them to sell at prices that small farms can’t match.

“We would need to have hundreds of hectares of land and breed thousands of sheep to be able to get a proper income,” said Maj, who remembers the stress her parents experienced trying to support a family of seven from farming. “As kids, we didn’t realise how difficult it is.”

Small farmers who try to expand or modernise also face hurdles. They say they struggle to get loans that would let them make the investments needed to compete with industrial farms.

“Banks usually don’t like to give credit to farmers,” says Carlos Franco, a blueberry farmer near Lisbon. “If you have a pig they can give you a sausage – but the opposite is not possible. It’s very difficult for people to begin without assets to give as collateral.”

Franco, who comes from the city but has fond memories of his grandfather’s farm in the country, says he started his own farm eight years ago and expects to break even this year for the first time. If he had been able to secure a big loan from the beginning, he says, he could have bought an automated pumping system that would have helped him hit that point in half the time.

Big farms have more capital, and tend to be less reliant on a single product than small farmers, says Franco. “They don’t put all their eggs in the same basket.”

The income crisis among small farmers helped fuel violent protests at the start of the year that farming lobbies used to rail against rules to protect nature and cut pollution. Environmental campaigners argue that big farms exploited public sympathy for small farmers to reject green measures the rest of the sector could afford.

Some small farmers see both sides. Bighelaar, who works on his parents’ 60-hectare dairy farm, says the investments needed to comply with environmental rules are, indeed, expensive – and thus more palatable on a big farm than a small one. If he had to invest €100,000 in technology to reduce nitrogen pollution, he says, it would be easier to stomach if he could spread the costs over 200 cows rather than the 125 he has.

“For small farms and middle-size farms, it’s way harder to join in this transition,” says Bighelaar. “We want to join … but it’s not possible for us because our size is too small.”

Stakeholders from across the food supply chain agreed in September on the need to reform the EU’s farm subsidy scheme, which hands out more money to bigger farms. They proposed solutions such as supporting farmers based on their needs and creating a just transition fund to help them reduce their environmental footprint.

Some farmers say they have taken steps toward sustainable practices without costly loans and investments. Airi Kylvet, an organic beef farmer in Estonia, says she has invested in her knowledge of cows and land rather than in expensive machinery – but that the administrative burden is still a huge source of stress. “There are a million officials who control us and deal with only one sector of the system. But the farmer has to know it all.”

“If you want to be a successful farmer you have to be really wise,” she says. “There are a lot of farmers who are good at farming but not good at dealing with all this bureaucracy.”

But even as small farmers voice fears about environmental rules becoming more onerous, they also worry about extreme weather growing more violent. Maj was hit by the heavy rain that devastated central Europe last month, destroying half a hectare of her land. Franco says the “incredibly hot” weather that has scorched Europe in recent years has made his blueberry plants rot and burn. Studies show both weather extremes were made worse by pollutants heating the planet, about a quarter of which come from food systems.

Despite all the stresses, Franco says, he takes pleasure in seeing plants bloom and bees buzz when he works in the fresh farm air. “In Portugal, we say: agriculture is a way of becoming poor but happy.”

Colum McCann

Irish-born novelist and nonfiction author whose books include Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon. McCann has lived in New York for three decades

Almost 40 years ago, I was as a young journalist travelling across the deep south of the United States. I found myself sitting outside a diner in Waycross, Georgia, jawing with some good ol’ boys. One of them was a perfect American cartoon. Baseball hat. Plaid shirt. He used the N-word in a protracted jukebox drawl as he struck a match head off the heel of his boots.

He turned out to be an elected sheriff from a nearby town and he was running in an election on a segregationist ticket. He invited me to his house with his wife and family amid the tall cypress trees.

It turned out the sheriff was all about “state’s rights” (meaning the right of states to pass Jim Crow laws), “freedom of association” (separating the races), more “Jee-sus” and “less government”.

I was confused and horrified. But while we were at the dinner table with his sulky children, an extraordinary thing happened. A screech of tyres. A crunch of metal. We ran outside and up the road to the corner where a lone car had smashed into a tree. Inside, the occupants, a Black family – a man, a woman and two children – were shaken up. The father had cut his forehead. The sheriff tore off his shirt and dabbed it against the blood. His wife ran home to arrange for an ambulance. The Black couple protested. They had no money. The sheriff touched the woman’s shoulder and told her they would be all right.

At the hospital, doctors insisted that the injured man stay overnight. His wife didn’t know where to stay. “Don’t worry,” the sheriff said, “y’all can sleep the night in my place.”

By the next afternoon, the car had been repaired for free and the hospital bill was settled. After making pancakes, the sheriff bid the couple goodbye.

“Hell,” he said, when I asked him about the extraordinary gulf between what he had said, and believed, and what he had done, “everyone’s human, ain’t they?”

Everyone’s human until they aren’t. If the sheriff was both old school and an advance scout for the Trumpian imagination, he also held something rare in these turbulent times: the ability to echo that turbulence, to contradict himself, and to contain, as Walt Whitman would have said, multitudes.

We live in times when the channels of certainty are deeply dug. The multitudinous aspect of who we are – not just in America but everywhere else – is largely denied. Come into the room if you sound like me, or you look like me, or you vote like me, but otherwise stay the fuck out. This disease of certainty – the absolute need to remain in the one channel – is the defining mystery of our contemporary social contract, and it’s especially evident in the current election. We are canals, not rivers. We have been carved out to a purpose. We carry things for industry and for political parties and corporations and whatever other non-human entities need us.

Hideous as he was, it would now be difficult for the sheriff to be the same man he was 40 years ago.

The political canals are dug. The private and the public American are a singular thing.

In his 1993 collection of essays, Culture and Imperialism, the Palestinian writer Edward Said suggested that no one today is purely one thing, either white or Black or western or Asian. He called on the world to recognise that it is “more rewarding – and more difficult – to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about ‘us’”. We can, he suggested, be so much more than one thing.

Maybe Kamala Harris’s difficulty is that she is, in fact, operating contrapuntally. A child of immigrants, with a Black father and an Indian mother (a district attorney, a woman with a career of shattering glass ceilings), she might be too speckled for our tied-down times. Trump, on the other hand, is relatively easy to pinpoint – he offers little more sustenance than the damp white loaf that he embodies. But his simplicity fits with the certainty and poisoned narrowness of our times that has made this race – which should not even be close – into a test of the character of our times: are we capable of being more than one thing?

Is there any hope of any solace? Given what is going on – to vast silence – in the Middle East and Sudan and elsewhere, one would have to unfortunately think no. Solace gives way to a sort of mediocre acceptance. Most centre- or left-leaning people I know feel that a Harris victory might just about be a temporary relief, while a Trump victory would be an ongoing disaster. This is not an election so much about hope as it is about survival.

But the president you get doesn’t have to be the country you get.

Is there any way to shake the soul of the US out of its malignant certainty? What could ignite an imaginative fury? Maybe a strong third party. Or full political representation for the District of Columbia (for the past 200 years Washington DC has been considered a district, and not a state, effectively denying three-quarters of a million people full political representation in Congress). Or a takedown of the electoral college, resulting in a system that – logic and democracy forbid! – gives the presidency to the person who gets the most votes.

As my late father used to say: “Don’t put all your begs in one ask-it.”

Or maybe it will come down to teachers and artists and students and ordinary people who recognise that it’s about time for some decency, cordiality and personal engagement. While we certainly don’t need the sheriffs of bygone times, we do need those who can see one another’s humanity, even in the most seemingly impossible circumstances.

What people will vote for on 5 November is the survival of a messy hope against the myopia of certainty.

Margo Jefferson

Pulitzer prize-winning critic, academic and nonfiction author whose works include Negroland and Constructing a Nervous System

We are all on tenterhooks about the election. I am following newspapers, online postings, podcasts, TV. Every so often I’ll get overwhelmed and pull back briefly, but that’s mostly to refresh myself. Like many people, I’m often terrified. It’s such a ghoulish spectacle. There’s this glee around Trump and his supporters, who thrive on vicious accusations about Haitians eating dogs and cats and women killing babies, on infantile protests, sneers and denunciations. So, yes, I’m frightened, and I’m angry too. We keep saying to one another: “How did we get here?” Well, that can be analysed, but still, he’s so low, so debased. And yet here he is.

Looking back over Biden’s time in office, he’s done some good things domestically, in his support of unions for example, and raising wages, but he has not been impressive internationally, though he likes to think that’s his core strength. Just look at the Middle East. He’s obviously made a mess of it. It’s not only his actions, or non-actions, but also his manner, the way he all but dismisses the horrors of Gaza. That’s just not acceptable.

Closer to home, one can quarrel with him or object to some mealy mouthed statement about this or that, but for people with a certain amount of social and economic security, life goes on, as it has for me. Of course I understand the anger and alarm at prices going up. But the sentimentality about the Trump years, the dreamland of how effective Trump was on the economy, I find intolerable. And I’m shocked that he is let off the hook about Covid by so many of his supporters.

I am very glad Biden didn’t run again. That would have been impossible, both for reasons that are fair, in terms of mistakes he’s made, but also in terms of the post-debate rap against him. He wasn’t going to be able to surmount that. So I was profoundly relieved when he stepped aside, but he should have done it earlier. It left Harris at a great disadvantage in terms of time. Now, voters who are unsure about her can say: “I don’t know enough about her.” I do think that is partly a form of evasion. There are ways you can find out more. But it reflects a kind of uncertainty, a suspiciousness that has everything to do with her being a woman, and a woman of colour, as well as her having been Biden’s vice-president.

When Harris stepped forward, there was the ebullience and joy of having a new candidate and being released from the terrible certainty that Biden would lose. So some of the joy came from sheer possibility. There are points I wish she would emphasise more fully and declarations I wish she would make, but she’s certainly shown, given the level of misogyny in our society, get-down-to-business gutsiness. Discipline and intelligence. You saw that in the debate. She’s not afraid of Trump in any way. That’s impressive. What I can’t gauge is what difference it’s making to people who are wavering. If you’re undecided, you have to take more of a leap of thought as well as faith to vote for Harris.

One of the obsessions in the news coverage in recent weeks has been about Harris losing Black male votes. Of course it’s worrisome, but the major problem here is disgruntled white men not voting for her. It was almost as if there was a kind of projection of all our worries on to these Black men, who certainly should know better. Well, your white men should know better too, but they don’t.

Trump is very much the same beast we’ve seen before, only worse. The insults flung at women, at immigrants, or at any opponents, are gleeful, reckless and genuinely ugly. They excite people and they stick. He’s more degraded, the aggression has intensified, and now he’ll say anything that his little psyche throws up. It’s horrifying to watch. I don’t invest huge amounts of psychic energy into being proud to be an American, but I find looking at him humiliating. This is what this powerful country has produced, and what so many citizens endorse. My God. It’s not just shameful. It is humiliating.

Whoever wins, we are going to have demonstrations, fights, all kinds of legal challenges. We will be in turmoil. At least if Harris wins, there will be some kind of norm, of respectability, of reasonableness, of legal and political systems operating in ways that we understand and have legislated for. But it will be harder because the Republican party remains the Republican party. These divisions and their will to power are unshakable.

What will I be doing on 5 November when the results start coming through? I was talking about that with friends, some of whom are insisting they’ll go to bed early. I remember doing that in 2016 when it became clear that Trump was going to win and I just thought, well, night night. This time I will be watching up to a point, probably up to midnight, and then I suspect it will get so cluttered and clamorous that one will try to sleep, but will any of us sleep, really? As told to Killian Fox

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Richard Ford

Novelist best known for his series featuring the character Frank Bascombe, including The Sportswriter, the Pulitzer prize-winning Independence Day and Let Me Be Frank With You

The problem for American now is how to ready ourselves to face a new Trump presidency. Preparing seems the only sensible thing to do – rather than putting on the blinkers like most of my friends. Oh, I loathe the prospect. Don’t get me wrong. And we need to hold an election, first. I’d have voted for Biden. He’s a good enough man, though he proved surprisingly power-hungry and had to be driven out of the race whingeing and mewling. And I’ll unhesitatingly vote for Ms Harris – though she hasn’t made an especially good candidate, yet might make a decent president if she can get over her fear of making mistakes. In their own quite hesitant and narcissistic way, the Democratic party has put the country up for grabs by not ratifying a qualified Biden successor two years ago. They’re a disgrace, and in their doze don’t even seem to know it. Whether they win or lose, it’s hard for me to wish a future for them as they are. No wonder only 66% of us vote.

Trump, meanwhile, has basically promised to ruin the country if he’s elected: to be a dictator, to terminate the constitution, to drag the US out of Nato, to forgo our Ukraine and Taiwan commitments, to sell out the Palestinians, to build walls of expensive tariffs, to give Russia carte blanche to invade more of its neighbours, to attack Iran, to re-exit the Paris climate accords – and these are just his foreign policy goals.

Domestically, he pledges to repopulate the justice and state departments with his sycophants, to stack the supreme court with more extremists, to prosecute and jail his opponents, to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency and the department of education, to ban the teaching of Black history, to abandon school meals programmes for kids, and to leave reproductive rights to the coarse motley of the 50 states. Pretty much everything but ordering drone strikes on Chicago.

A lot of Americans want precisely that, of course. My wife and I hear them snarling and fuming about it in diners, in the grocery store, in car repairs and at the bank around where we live, here in eastern Montana. On my flight across the Atlantic last month, I sat beside a professor of constitutional law at the prestigious University of Virginia. This woman told me she believed vice-president Harris to be a non-entity, and that a second Trump presidency would “stabilise America’s place in the world”. She conceded there were “some problems” with Trump. But I walked off the plane convinced she’d vote for him. Who knows what these people have been drinking?

Curiously, though, polling shows that when American voters see more of Mr Trump his popularity declines. Whereas, when they see less of him, his popularity squirts up – a bad omen, you’d think, in a popularity contest. Yet it might make the task of beating Trump easier if swooning Democrats can just cause more people to see him, and by framing him the way they want him seen – which is pretty much as he is: a bloated, orangish, cartoon creature spouting nonsense and untruth a mile a minute, a figure so unreal and inauthentic it might be difficult to make him out clearly.

In what may turn out to have been a providential stroke (though it seemed to me too tame at the time), Harris’s brain trust, last summer, hit upon a momentarily resonant strategy – portraying Mr Trump as “weird” rather than as the great Satan. A diminished buffoon. No one to take seriously. This is a familiar American archetype, one we all grew up with. The incompetent, slightly daft village screw-loose. A sort of feral Oliver Hardy – unquestionably an individual most Americans wouldn’t imagine being president, albeit not misreading the threat he fecklessly poses to us and the world.

Thus. Seeing Trump as he bizarrely presents is what we citizens will have to do if he incongruously wins back the presidency. This is how we face it.

Plus, setting goofy archetypes aside, I find myself taking perverse comfort that such a man as strange as Trump actually submits to running for the presidency at all, that he mounts an actual campaign, worries and fidgets and blasphemes that he might not win. That he fears prison – just the way a normal, non-orange person would. This suggests to me that Donald Trump is at heart an institutional creature; a clownishly spoiled child, always trying to get away with something, but who knows it and knows better; a man, in Trump’s case, who cares inordinately about how he looks and how history will judge him. His Maga followers may be nihilists and anarchists and thugs, or just greedy oligarchs who cheat on their taxes. But Trump is (one almost wants to say merely) a narcissist, whose most destabilising defect is that he and we never know what he’s going to say or do next. Listen to his speeches – if you can. All he wants is to please and aggrandise himself. Big, complicated countries may pride themselves on having strong leaders, but they thrive on predictability and consistency at the top. Whereas Trump’s idea of leading is just to say stuff – such as abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency, or terminating the constitution, or injecting bleach into humans to cure Covid. After which he says other opposite stuff – such as after boasting about abolishing the right to an abortion, he declares himself a supporter of reproductive freedom. He’s nearly 80 – my age, for Christ’s sake.

So, if he becomes president again we need not to take up arms against our neighbours or relocate to Bali or Connemara, but to strive evermore to see Trump as that strange but knowable creature he is. More like our fallible selves than the great destroyer. This can be our way to preserve our country: vigilantly to see Donald Trump so we can vigorously oppose him, stymie him, impugn him, deride and defeat him using whatever institutions of government he can’t abolish. As with all our 46 presidents, governing the US has always required a battle.

And by the theory of lasts, I also happen to think that President Donald Trump doesn’t really want his legacy to be that he took down the United States of America – no matter what he says. Not that I think he’s really a good guy, down deep. He’s really not. He just couldn’t do without the US. Its institutions and traditions are his vital context. But whether he wins or loses, I have to stay hopeful – not let him turn me against my better self or my country’s. In the end, I think there’ll be more Americans who don’t want to see the US wrecked than there are those who do or who don’t care. There’s a chance good might prevail in November. We just can’t avert our gaze from the thought that it might not and in that way render ourselves unready.

First, though, there’s November fifth. We need to vote.

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Marilynne Robinson

Award-winning novelist and essayist whose 2005 book, Gilead, won the Pulitzer prize

A great source of energy behind the rise of the Maga phenomenon is the idea, and realisation, that there has been a pervasive and highly effective campaign of indoctrination going on in this country for decades, since the civil rights movement. All societies indoctrinate their members, of course. They educate, adjudicate, give or withhold approval, expressing and reinforcing assumptions that support institutions and shape character. In our case the indoctrination was meant to promote change rather than to maintain a status quo. The country had, beginning in the 1950s, passed through a great awakening, more powerful than most. Americans realised finally that prevalent attitudes about colour and gender led to insupportable injustice and the suppression of gifted populations. The problem was societal. Behind any instance of insult or exclusion there were the prejudices that normalised such behaviour. So, much of America set about to change these attitudes. The work is not done but the effort has been fruitful enough to have triggered a potent reaction against it in the past decade.

“Indoctrination” is a word with darkly negative connotations. But the best societies do have doctrines which at least name their aspirations, and they teach them, actively and passively. In our case, the promotion of reform came under the hostile scrutiny of the conspiracy-minded. The genius of this worldview is that no policy or idea has to be considered on its merits because it is all scheming and fakery, however apparently plausible. No fact need be acknowledged, no source credited unless it is wise to the great deception. Debate and persuasion are defeated before they begin.

The recoil from liberalisation has placed its opponents in a very strange place. When America was church-going and many churches were sound, precepts that ran against the grain of personal interest were familiar and respected. These revanchists overwhelmingly claim to be Christian, but if loving the neighbour, not to mention the stranger or the enemy, involves any cost or disadvantage they are outraged. With Trump as their guide and model, they have found their way to a netherworld of primitive emotions. We know these feelings from the cradle, though we may unlearn them at an attentive mother’s knee. Basically, they go like this: if I feel fear, then something or someone is threatening me and this must be dealt with as a matter of extreme urgency. So too with anger and resentment. Greed belongs in this suite of primal emotions because it is admired and because it lies behind fear of the loss of status, whatever that may have amounted to, and behind the anxious certainty that others’ prosperity must diminish one’s own. No profit or happiness is imagined that might come to a society truly committed to justice.

I have been amazed and appalled to see my great-hearted America go into eclipse behind this mean, undignified nonsense. My former home state, Iowa, has turned deep red, rejected its own liberal history, relaxed its child labour laws, cut food aid to poor children, banned books, prohibited equity policies in state universities, and on and on.

But then came the Democratic national convention, and our much disparaged diversity showed its beautiful face. I am old enough to know how much has been accomplished, how gratifying it is to have the benefit of the brilliance and purpose of people who, in my childhood, had virtually no voice or presence in public life. The convention was a joyous celebration of the fact that we do know how to reform, which gives us practical hope for further reform. The change in the political atmosphere in this country has been unbelievably swift, in fact sudden. The emergence of Kamala Harris has put matters in extremely capable hands, clearly. And many of us, quite possibly an electoral majority, were waiting for the day when civility, humanity and hope would reassert themselves.

If Harris wins I expect important continuity with Biden, especially regarding foreign affairs. I would expect big programmes like his, to ease the housing shortage, for example. I think she would support and enhance education and healthcare, the kinds of things expected of a Democrat. A normal president has a strong interest in basic continuity, with changes the public and the Congress can agree to support. I would expect her to be strategic and persuasive.

If Trump wins, I don’t think anyone, even he, knows what to expect. Everything depends on what he thinks from day to day are his interests, and how they can best be served. He has his pals and is very readily influenced by them, and by flattery. As a rhetorical tactic, he makes truly terrible threats involving mass deportations of immigrants, also concentration camps, prosecution of critics and political opponents, and he makes truly crazy threats, like bombing drug cartels in Mexico or giving Putin free rein in Europe. He desolates the landscape of rational expectation, then if he hasn’t done anything as dreadful as his threats, it is as if there were nothing in the malicious lunacy he offers to his crowds that should alarm us. Major Republican politicians support him on this basis. He has acquired vast latitude on the grounds that few actually believe anything he says. How do you challenge someone with no credibility? I have never heard of such a creature, or seen influence like his. He says hideous things about America to people swaddled in flags and they cheer themselves hoarse. He is neither Christian nor nationalist but he might stir up a crusade of sorts among people who claim these identities in order to fall into line with him. God knows how that would end. He is silent about normal policy positions. He wants to cut taxes. The wealthy would benefit.

We may expect him to govern in accordance with his own interests as he perceives them – an adviser might suggest he be more presidential, but that would mean no more calling names or selling gimmicks to suckers, so that won’t happen. Other than that, he seems to feel he has the mandate of heaven without regard to votes. If he actually is elected, he will be full of a sense of the truly preposterous power of an American president, and of whatever retrogressive or retributive use he might try to make of it.