In recent years you may have read whole screeds on “the Trump doctrine”, often written by former foreign ministers or revered diplomats, which singularly fail to capture the essence of the entity with which they are dealing. Maybe the reason they seem to have had so much trouble codifying things convincingly is that most of these people either regard showbiz as beneath them or know slightly less about it than they do about some obscure branch of theoretical chemistry. The muddle they get into is trying to compare and contrast Trump with Henry Kissinger or Benjamin Franklin or a pick-your-20th-century Euro-dictator, when it should obviously be Elizabeth Taylor or actual Taylor or turbo-monster-era Led Zeppelin.