If there was any doubt that we've entered a new age of strongman impunity, the gushing re-embrace of Donald Trump has settled the question.
Future historians will note that it was American voters who shifted toward him, not the other way around.
Now, the full extent of the apex-power's global impunity is also becoming terrifyingly clear.
It is an impunity that accommodates the frontal traducing of the long-held Western constants of universal human rights, national sovereignty (including the right to self-determination) and a rules-based international order that renders territorial acquisition by force, illegal.
These are values dating back to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and the post-WWII establishment of the United Nations for which an imperfect America had long stood as ultimate guarantor.
Not anymore. Instead, an America-first Trump has radically expanded the executive reach of his office and shown with astonishing derring-do, that a presidency can be re-configured to operate largely beyond the fetters of courts, the press and even the Congress.
For his unprecedented expansion, Trump claims an explicit popular mandate for disruption and deploys a billionaire class of tech-titan "broligarchs" whom he has woven into the very fabric of his administration. The world's richest man has been given access to critical government payment systems including the Treasury.
The speed of this transformation is dizzying and yet still just in its infancy. Bernie Sanders says the US has moved from democracy to oligarchy.
America's allies are intimidated into silence, their leaders petrified that the mercurial president's penchant for tariffs and worried, too, that a Trumpian opposition could be orchestrated within their domestic polity.
America's fourth estate, that fearsome bulwark against the Nixon White House's corruption and coverup, is now firing blanks, its language of outrage hollowed by repetition.
Trump-aligned media ensure the president's crazy policy turns atwore "normalised" rendering legitimate journalistic interrogation partisan.
Amid the storm, reporters find themselves playing down even the most spectacular presidential statements (invading Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal, making Canada the 51st state) for fear of being ostracised. One wonders where it will end. As the saying goes, "the road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting".
Besides, how could one overreact to what just happened when the wily Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu became the first world leader to visit the Trump White House?
Consider the impropriety (and the optics) of a criminally convicted American president hosting an alleged architect of genocide to nut out a plan to banish 2 million Palestinians from their ancestral homelands and turn the Gaza Strip over to American ownership.
Trump the property developer, who had previously said Gaza should be "cleaned out" spoke of "levelling the site" and building a new Riviera in the Middle East.
An inhuman circular logic meant justifying the forced removal (ethnic cleansing) of Gaza's battered civilians because of rubble and unexploded bombs - American bombs dropped relentlessly on civilians by the man standing on his right at the press conference.
The man the International Criminal Court has issued with an arrest warrant. Trump's response has been to apply personal sanctions on ICC members.
So wide is Trump's impunity that it even extends to his speech which his backers say should not be taken literally. Marco Rubio, Trump's secretary of state who was praised as a moderate, characterised American ownership of Gaza as a generous gesture, "not a hostile one." Others in the White House said Gazan displacement would only be temporary despite America's ownership.
An admiring Peter Dutton lauds him as a "big thinker".
The suggestion, in other words, is that Trump's statements are performances, ambit claims and red meat to his base. If you take it literally, the joke's on you. What president or other world leader enjoys this latitude?
Yet despite all this, there are lessons for other governments in his approach and they are not all bad.
In a perceptive article published just days after Trump's concussive term began, Anna McShane argued that the methodology of the American populist warrants a more dispassionate analysis by progressives in Britain.
With the glacially advancing British Labour government of Keir Starmer drifting in the polls, McShane, who is the director of The New Britain Project - a progressive think tank - began her piece thusly: "Starmer must learn from Trump: Act fast, prioritise visible change, and keep showing voters you're on their side".
It's a hard pill to swallow: "Learn" from Trump?
But if serious substantive progressive governments are to survive in the era of politics as reality TV, they must also learn to grab attention and become faster in the delivery of "visible change".
McShane argues the American's dominance relies on fast and furious action and the sense of immediate progress.
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"Trump's strategy demonstrates the power of immediate, visible action. His signing spree - at one point staged theatrically in front of cheering supporters - was designed to show his supporters that promises were being kept.
"It wasn't just about the policies; it was about sending a clear signal: change was happening."
Labor takes comfort from the paucity of Dutton's policy offerings so far. But what if his plan involves a raft of attention-grabbing first-100-day commitments designed to show he would govern for voters rather than the system?
Trumpian? Crazy? Perhaps both.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast.
