THE scenes from Washington, where people were using violence to prevent the workings of democracy and to overturn the result of a fair and free election, are truly shocking.

That they were deliberately incited by President Donald Trump makes them even more staggering.

Trump was elected under the slogan “make America great again”. He has done nothing of the sort. In fact, he has humiliated America, and its opponents from China to Iran are taking great delight in mocking the country and its values.

This matters to us in the UK because we share those American values of freedom and democracy, and we want to see them triumph. We don’t want to see them violently suppressed, as they have been in Hong Kong, for example, and as they would have been in America if Trump’s unstable ragtag bag of conspiracy theorists and extremists had had their way.

Trump has shown he does not respect America, its values, its institutions or its democracy. He cares only for himself and his narcissistic desire not to go down in history as a loser.

Trump continues to talk of a “fraudulent election” in the hope that repeating it will make it true. He has not won any of the 42 court cases he has pursued which leads any sane person to conclude that there is no evidence of wholesale electoral fraud.

Trump was yesterday termed unfit to be on social media and banned from Facebook, and yet he is still in office until January 20, still surrounded by the trappings of power, still making partisan decisions, still embarrassing his country, still with his fingers on the nuclear buttons.