The US has been gripped by a culture of institutionalised violence - David Behrens

Some might say the honours system has gone too far if we’re now handing out gongs to goats, but the ceremony somehow summed up the quiet decorum of a traditional British summer: umbrellas at Wimbledon and an England football team not winning a trophy.

Even when we protested, we did so with British civility. Some Just Stop Oil militants sprayed orange powder onto the Duke and Duchess of Westminster’s wedding procession at Chester Cathedral. Another appeared in court for doing the same thing at the snooker championships in Sheffield and was spared jail.

Those were puerile protests but the choice of weapon was essentially harmless. It was basically the same orange stuff Donald Trump puts on his face.

Trump himself was blessing his luck this week that Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old kitchen worker who went to a campaign rally with a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle, was not a better shot.

We may never know what motivated Crooks to act as he did but we do know his action was a spectacular miscalculation that has all but sealed the result of the presidential election. The perception of Trump has shifted from philandering tax cheat to full-blooded American hero, exalted by even former rivals within his party.

“Donald Trump has been demonised, he’s been sued, he’s been prosecuted and he nearly lost his life – we cannot let him down,” said his fair-weather friend, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who only a few weeks ago was biting at his ankles.

But let’s not get carried away. More than anything, Trump was a victim last Saturday of the culture of institutionalised violence he has done so much to promote in his own interest and so little to prevent in anyone else’s.

Had the bullet hit its target, his place would have been taken on the Republican ticket by someone even further in thrall to the cancerous gun lobby eating away at America. It might have been Marjorie Taylor Greene, the deranged Georgia congresswoman who said after the shooting that Democrats were “the party of paedophiles” even though the gunman was a Republican. She makes Trump seem like a moderate.

Or it could have been the Ohio senator JD Vance, who described Britain under Labour as the first “truly Islamist” country with a nuclear weapon. Vance is now Trump’s running-mate, which means he will be president in the event that anything else happens to his boss.

It will be a lasting regret for the world that Republicans had not turned on Trump in the way Democrats did on Joe Biden, before Thomas Crooks unwittingly enshrined him. Until last week, both candidates were damaged and debilitated but while Biden’s party responsibly confronted those vulnerabilities, Republicans chose to ignore them.

Even Boris Johnson took Trump’s side in an intervention we must presume was some sort of job interview. They spent half an hour discussing Ukraine, he said. Half an hour? It takes longer than that for Trump to find it on a map.

But we’re going to have to get used to the idea that four more years of his unhinged leadership is now almost a foregone conclusion.

And while we may take comfort from our own relative moderation at the ballot box, we should not be complacent – for violent insurrection is not exclusively an American phenomenon. Eight years ago, when Trump was last running for office, it happened right here in Yorkshire.

Jo Cox was Labour MP for Batley and Spen, campaigning in the street against Brexit when she was stabbed by a right-wing extremist who shouted “This is for Britain” as she lay dying. This week, her widower, Brendan, said the level of intimidation against politicians had since reached new heights. Brutality and intimidation, he observed, were becoming legitimised.

There is still a vast cultural gap between us and the US, but violence breeds more violence. And today’s orange powder may just be tomorrow’s AR-15.