THE PRESIDENT THAT NEVER WAS

Not long ago, a fresh rumour gained traction amid the phantasmagoria of the QAnon conspiracy theoryindustrial complex. It held that John F. Kennedy Jr. had faked his death in a plane crash in 1999 and was about to emerge from a Pennsylvania bolthole to be declared Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick for the 2020 election. Some went further, positing that JFK Jr. was responsible for the recondite call-to-action postings of Q himself.

For a movement that contains such self-evident truths as the existence of a cannibalistic cabal of paedophiles running the ‘deep state’ from the basements of Washington pizza parlours, this particular shibboleth not only verged on the comparatively plausible but tapped into an inchoate yearning for the advent of some kind of American saviour, maybe the yin to Trump’s yang. In any case, it was a suitably Arthurian allusion for a man who seemed to embody all the gilded, truncated promise of the Camelot his name and inheritance conferred. Ridiculously handsome,