Love him, hate him, regard him with stunned stupefaction, or think him slightly less awful than Hillary Clinton, everyone has to acknowledge that, as a national leader, Donald Trump is unique.

To Jonathan Chait, he is more than unsettling, expressing the views of a Mussolini-in-waiting in the tones of a Don Rickles riff. But what do we make of a dictator who talks in the voice of a Borscht Belt comedian? Perhaps that he is a Borscht Belt comedian, who somehow contrived to slip out of his element and into a parallel world.