With him, it’s a return to the lost paradise of the wide-open spaces of the American West. An armed sheriff leading his caravan, the Republican candidate surfs on the vertigo of a disoriented America.

Ah, if only he could have stuck to his glorious image of an animal wounded in the assassination attempt on 13 July! Donald Trump, his temple bloodied, rises to his feet, tearing himself away from his guards. For a few minutes, he was her dream: the hero, the survivor. Then Biden finally withdrew, and along came the elegant Kamala, the unexpected Democratic gazelle. But the image of 13 July 2024 will remain, as a concentrate of what electrifies crowds, magnetises them and bewitches them. A return to the lost paradise of the dominator of the great outdoors, of John Wayne firing bullets to protect the caravan.

With Donald Trump, half of America is waiting for the train to whistle a fourth time before jumping on the step of the past. The past is what is still when you are afraid of losing everything, when you have already lost everything. The past is the sledgehammer argument used by those who see the future on the dotted line, with little idea of what’s next in the programme. Not to be confused, of course, with those who know how to dose it with lucidity in the present. None of that with Trump: he is the raw, brutal past, the force that is going.

The American messianists, those evangelists eager for a beautiful apocalypse, adore him. And with them, all the “big kids”, as our friends across the Atlantic defined them in the 1960s. It was silly, but it was as much about them as it was about us, Frenchmen fascinated by their westerns as they were by our cloak-and-dagger sagas.

In the West, nothing new: Trump still wants to drive his herd back there. To mythologise and sheep-mill as far as the eye can see. Why hide from it and be astonished by it, like the moral high ground: people need that too! Otherwise, the hell of civil, regional and world wars would long ago have sunk into a sea of gentleness.

Trump is not a caricature but a reality. In an early bestseller entitled “Art of the Deal”, since disowned by the journalist who helped him write it, he argued for the right to excess on the road to success. It is as obvious as the regret of childhood in each of us: the extreme is the first movement of beings. Only then does the patient polishing of civilisation, citizenship and democracy take place. This seems to support the theory of the reptilian brain, popularised in the aftermath of the Second World War by American researchers.