RNC 2016: Donald Trump could appear naked with a Trotsky tattoo on his chest and still become US president

As the journey towards TrumpWorld speeds up, we look for solace where we may.

For those not keen on using mind-altering drugs – and frankly, who needs hallucinogens in a reality like this? – the best I can do is quote a politician from a marginally different tradition.

“Nothing matters very much,” said Arthur Balfour, briefly Tory prime minister early in the 20th century, “and few things matter at all.”

While the nihilist might agree in general that the certainty of death de-venoms even as poisonous a notion as President Donald J Trump, this is specifically true of his march on the White House.

What Trump and his team say or do long ago lost all meaning in any conventional electoral sense. Had he chosen Clyde, Clint Eastwood’s orangutan sidekick, or even Clint’s empty chair Trump could give his Convention keynote address clad in nothing but an anaconda hanging out of his anus, and a romanticised portrait of Leon Trotsky tattooed on his torso, and his prospects wouldn’t recede by a nanometer.

So accept this brutal truth. If the winds at Trump’s back – raw racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, white bitterness about stagnated wages and outsourced jobs – are strong enough, as they appear to be, no vileness or insanity, no ignorance or stupidity, will blow him off course now.

In that context, the opening of the Republican Convention in Cleveland – sickening and fiascoid even by Trump standards though it certainly was – must be wholly discounted as an electoral influence.

This does not mean we shouldn’t relish it. On a rollercoaster ride, the choice between being nauseated or exhilarated is no choice at all. The two immutably go together.

And there was so much to enjoy on the first day. A floor fight, for example, in which the Never Trump brigade was routed in its attempt to free delegates from a binding duty to vote for Donald in accord with their electors’ will. Trump deflecting attention from a platform speech in his praise with an appearance on (where else?) the Golf Channel. Delegates taking a break from “USA, USA” to chant “Lock her up, lock her up!” about Hillary Clinton.

Yet on Day One the coup de théâtre concerned not a former First Lady, but a potential one of tomorrow. Melania Trump is the third and possibly final Mrs T, although given her old man’s candidly expressed preference for a “young piece of ass” (as Melania mentioned in her speech, he is “a big thinker”), no 46-year-old could feel too smug there.

For now, the baton is with Melania, however, and didn’t she run like a gazelle with it in Cleveland on Monday?

For Melania, an erstwhile front cover model from Slovenia, the problem was verbal rather than visual. Within minutes of her concluding her paean, it emerged that chunks had been nicked, wholesale and almost verbatim, from Michelle Obama’s speech to the 2008 Democratic convention.

Short of beginning “As a young black woman growing up in Illinois”, Melania couldn’t have been more helpful to any hacks who believe, gawd love’ em, that nailing the campaign for outrageous plagiarism means diddly in TrumpWorld.

Did I mention that, in this context, nothing matters? Ordinarily, this being a far right anti-immigration campaign, Melania’s status as immigrant daughter of a Yugoslav Communist party member would be a gift to paranoia-stokers, who would smear her as a Commie Trojan Horse. Not here. Where have you gone, Joe Mc’Carthyo, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

And in ordinary circles, the fact that her dad, Viktor, is not only just five years older than her husband, but a ringer for him facially and tonsorially (check him out online; in some snaps, his barnet makes That Thing On Trump’s Head look normal), would spook the electorate.

These – and yeah, yeah, like this needs saying – are not ordinary times. With the planet riven by a colossal nervous breakdown, the tangerine lunatic is closer than ever to taking over the asylum. This may, in both senses, be the cheapest presidential campaign ever witnessed. In what we used to know as the real world, it wouldn’t be worth Trump-Pence ha’penny. Yet a few months before election day, with the candidates tied nationally and within the margin of error in all swing states, the momentum is with Trump.

If Brexit felt like a transatlantic omen about the irresistible power of anti-establishment rage, Friday’s atrocity in Nice cemented the gnawing suspicion that a too-close-to-call national security/Islamophobic US election will only break one way.

But hey, nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all. So keep repeating dear old Balfour’s mantra as the TrumpWorld Express hurtles towards Pennsylvania Avenue. Eventually, who knows, you might just hypnotise yourself into believing it.