With all the respect I can muster - and that's precious little - Mr Trump can shove his opinions about Europe right back where they seem to have come from. They are grossly disrespectful, ignorant, and just plain wrong.

But what do you expect from a man who has no concept of truth, decency, or justice?

A habitual liar, a misogynist, and a convicted sexual abuser, Donald Trump is hardly the ideal candidate to lead the free world or to demonstrate by his sheer human decency why democracy is so much better than totalitarianism. If Trump remains in office for much longer, then that argument, surely, is well and truly thrown down the gold-plated toilet.

Trump's latest foray into international statesmanship comes in the form of an interview with the American news site Politico. With all the skill and subtlety he can manage, he denounced Europe as a "decaying" group of nations led by "weak" people. By failing to end migration (so has Trump) and not ending the Russia-Ukraine war ("I can do that in 1 day", he famously quipped), America's staunchest ally is, apparently, a complete write-off. And, as if that were not enough gibberish for one interview, he has vowed to support political candidates aligned with his own vision for the future of the continent. That is a particularly bonkers threat as Trump's two defining characteristics over the last two months have been:

1. He has no vision - at least one that is identifiable and consistent. Just the ability to repeat whatever bile has been dripped into his ears and managed to seep into his one remaining neuron. His hot/cold stance on Ukraine says all that's needed about his ability to think in a straight line.

2. Support from Trump is an electoral kiss of death. Don't ask me for evidence. Just look at his fragmenting Maga base and those sycophants he surrounds himself with who are busy preparing their go-bags for an emergency dash to the hills.

And with his incisive message for Europe, Donald J Trump, the 47th President of the formerly United States, has closed his first year in office. What a towering intellectual, what a decent human being, someone for the next generation of rising politicians to look at, to inspect and (hopefully) to utterly reject.

Evolution, it seems, does sometimes take a step backward. Frightening creatures do emerge from the primordial swamp. Sometimes a cancer takes over. Let's hope for all our sakes that this experiment in the development of our species is an evolutionary cul-de-sac and that no political genes will be passed on to our next generation of leaders.