Even before the verdict of the New York jury which found him liable for sexually abusing E Jean Carroll, it was incredible that Donald Trump was considered the leading contender for the Republican nomination for the 2024 US Presidential election.
That some serious polls forecast he will defeat Joe Biden – the man who beat him in 2020 and whose victory he has spent years undermining with a whirlwind of lies – will seem little short of bewildering.
In any normal democratic system, the political career of a figure as toxic as Mr Trump would have sunk without trace as soon as he was ignominiously flushed out of the White House.
And in other times, even a hint of just one of the litany of scandals in which he has been involved in recent years would have spelled the end to further ambitions to hold public office.
The legal battles and official investigations Mr Trump is embroiled in include the January 6 Capitol attack, a 'hush money' case involving adult film star Stormy Daniels, an investigation into 'tax-free perks' at the Trump Organization, the removal of classified documents from the White House and his insistence that the 2020 election was rigged.
Compared to the tawdriness synonymous with the Trump name, it seems almost old fashioned to recall that marital infidelity was once enough to end a candidate's White House ambitions. That happened in 1987 when Gary Hart's bid to secure the Democratic nomination foundered on a scandal in which, as the New York Times put it at the time, the "facts floated on a sea of innuendo".
Mr Trump, meanwhile, has a history of making up his own facts and is a stranger to innuendo.
Although the jury rejected Ms Carroll's claim that Mr Trump had raped her in 1996, its finding that he had sexually abused her and subsequently defamed her when she went public in 2019 is a vindication of her decision to bring the former president to court.
Mr Trump hit out against the verdict in characteristically forthright – though many may also say delusional – manner, complaining about it as "a disgrace" and "the continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time".
Most people will instead regard Mr Trump as a disgrace; and far from being repentant or chastened, he is determined to press on with his bid to return to the White House.
This will dismay anyone who believes that integrity – not to mention respectful attitudes by men towards women – is of central importance in politics.
