For Europeans, today’s America serves a useful function: a model for how not to run your society. The US has already demonstrated how easy it is to lurch into plutocracy, or to split a country into two hostile tribes. Now it is offering another cautionary lesson: how to let Russian interference succeed by turning it into a partisan issue. Most Republicans are acting as if the problem isn’t Russian meddling in the 2016 election but the FBI’s handling of it.

Russia now has big ambitions for Europe. In the Italian elections on March 4, if you add up the predicted votes of the pro-Kremlin Five Star Movement and the Northern League, plus Vladimir Putin’s chum Silvio Berlusconi, you get to about 58 per cent. Possibly too late, officials around Europe are frantically building defences against Kremlin meddling.

People who warn about Russian disinformation are often accused of hysteria, so I’ll start with some caveats. True, Russia wasn’t the biggest factor in the US election. True, the US (like the UK) has an oversupply of homegrown fake news that dwarfs the quantity made in Russia. True, Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate. True, liberals need to understand the popular anger that Donald Trump embodies.