Every time a media commentator sniggers at her strangled syntax – as I’ve done here – it enables her to say to those voters: “They’re not laughing at me, they’re laughing at you.” The same goes for Trump. Mock him as an absurd blowhard, giggle at his inability to distinguish Hamas from Hezbollah if you like, but to the constituency he’s winning over it only makes him more, not less, a man of the people. We may want to howl with laughter when Palin says of Trump, the multibillionaire son of a property magnate, “he’s spent his life with the workin’ man”. But he’s casting himself as an outsider, and right now enough people are buying it.

This brand of populism has a long and ignoble history in US politics and it’s poisonous

There’s another reason not to laugh. Which is that this brand of populism is not new: it has a l ong and ignoble history in US politics, and it’s poisonous. It channels genuine, understandable rage and frustration – at stagnant wages, say, or rising healthcare costs – and directs it not at the real source of those problems but at much easier targets. Those always include the media or the Washington establishment, but it rarely ends there. Eventually it turns on an easily despised minority.