Day Four Fatigue. As Joe Biden’s vote creeps up and Trump creeps out, it feels like Groundhog Day. It’s Day Four of the 2020 American electoral moment. It’s a time of hope and despair (not necessarily in that order). It feels like life on replay.

How many times have you prayed for the ­centrist candidate to defeat the incumbent “evil”, only to be disappointed that the triangulation of your life and dreams fails in its own in-authenticity. Every. Time. Yet pragmatism is seductive. Be reasonable. Take people with you. Don’t frighten the horses. Folks, the horses are deid, nobody told you.

The difference is that as the stakes rise the game of playing off beliefs and principles seems a bit old. I’m not sure if Americans have the same obsession about our elections. Is there someone in Tampa opening up maps of the ­ballots counting in Auchtermuchty, or the ­re-count in ­Achiltibuie?

OK, my obsession with the demographics of the fourth district of Delaware seems a bit, well, obsessional. But the world is not symmetric in power. America doesn’t have Scottish weapons of mass destruction in their sea lochs. It’s not as pivotal to our global future if Nicola Sturgeon signs the Paris Climate Accord as it is if Joe Biden does.

The other day I compared the Trump family to the Romanian former president and his wife the Ceauescu’s (and more unfairly the Addams Family). Joking apart there was a famous ­moment in the Ceauescu’s downfall when ­booing (then completely unheard of) began from the back of a large public audience as Nicolae Ceauescu spoke. As the ripples of dissent broke from the back of the audience the iron grip of the autocrat who had presided over starvation and the brutal rule by the ubiquitous secret police force, the Securitate, began to loosen and then ­crumble.

On Thursday evening Donald Trump gave a speech in Washington which evoked a response similar to those brave Romanian protestors at the back of the crowd.

Daniel Dale a reporter in CNN’s Washington Bureau, wrote: “President Donald Trump delivered the most dishonest speech of his presidency on Thursday evening. I’ve watched or read the transcript of every Trump speech since late 2016. I’ve cataloged thousands and thousands of his false claims. I have never seen him lie more thoroughly and more egregiously than he did on Thursday evening at the White House. On the verge of what appeared to be a likely defeat by former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump emerged in the press briefing room and took a blowtorch to the presidential tradition of defending the legitimacy of the democratic ­process.”

In an unprecedented move the three big broadcast networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — cut away from President Trump’s news conference at the White House as the president lobbed a series of bizarre false claims about the integrity of the election. This is an astonishing move. The media are cutting off the President.

This is a tipping point. The trick would be to make it a tipping point for the media in the west and our treatment of corrupt and venal political elites, not just in the US of A but in Britain and Scotland too.

But if you’re exhausted and stressed by this process of removing a malignancy, think how tired the people who have been resisting ­police violence and harassment and state murder in their communities for over a year must be? And if we are celebrating media stations and individuals who have finally (finally!) found their breaking point as they stare in incomprehension at an attempted c oup which they are broadcasting live – and have been complicit in for years – then we should also be celebrating the millions of people in America that have been ­resisting the phenomena of Trump and the wider forces he represents.

At what point people find their tipping point varies. For many black communities this has been triggered by witnessing their communities being intimidated, their fathers and brothers and sons being incarcetated, their family members being murdered. If for the white ­liberal ­media the tipping point is witnessing the spectacle of an incumbent refusing to accept the ­result and the formal process of democracy crumbling, then so be it.

These are two worlds.

As Alex Jones attempts to instigate a civil war at the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, the toxicity of the blogosphere has tipped into IRL. The question is what happens next?

Can the apparatus of America’s shoogly ­democracy rise up to protect itself and its ­citizens, or will it descend into the madness of delusion, wild conspiracy and a descent into street fascism?

We’re about to find out.

In Umberto Eco’s classic essay How to Spot a Fascist he says: “At the root of Ur-Fascist psychology lies the obsession with conspiracies”. “The disciples must feel humiliated by the enemy’s vaunted wealth and power.” We can see this in the oscillation between Trump and his supporters desperate machismo and over-­compensation and then the expression of feelings of isolation and vulnerability. We can see this in Jones’s world – and its replica in a ­hundred thousand talk shows, blogs and forums. Trump’s ­projection of elite power when talking of “gated communities” is straight out of this playbook.

We can see this again and again as the paranoid tradition in American politics is nurtured and fed.

But if Trump is a malignancy, the body of America is riddled with the disease of Trumpism and it won’t be removed or solved by his ejection.

As Eddie Glaude, author of the 2020 book Begin Again, about James Baldwin and the history of American politics laid out in a memorable tirade on MSNBC where he described the dark roots of the Trump phenomena: “America is not unique in its sins ...I think where we may be singular is our refusal to acknowledge them and the legends and myths we tell about our ­inherent goodness ... so that we can maintain a kind of willful ignorance that protects our ­innocence.”

“This is the ugly underbelly of the country” he said to a chastened and mesmerised studio. “It happens every generation, so somehow we have to say ‘oh my god is this who we are’ ...

“It’s easy for us to place this all on Donald Trump’s shoulders, it’s easy for us to place Pittsburgh on his shoulders, it’s easy for us to place Charlottesville on his shoulders, it’s easy for us to place El Paso on his shoulders, ... this is US!”

This does feel like a moment of realisation that breaks the cycle of denial articulated by Glaude.

The question is can we include in the “things we don’t need to entertain” – the things that have “become intolerable”: police violence, ­institutional racism, allegations of voter fraud, children in cages – and can anyone make sense of that?

Is there enough commonality left in America beyond the empty symbols and slogans to "unite" and can that unity have meaning? Is there enough collective sense and enough sense of the collective to come together in a solidarity that isn’t based on false grievance and imagined threats but the very real ones – the threats that lie within America not beyond its borders, the threats that can’t be shut out by border walls. At least now the ripples of dissent have broken out from the back of the audience. That’s a start.