The World

In 1998, the BJP managed to form a coalition government. In February 2002, in Gujarat, where Modi was chief minister, elected after a campaign promoting Hindutva, a train bearing Hindu pilgrims to Ayodhya caught fire – probably after a Muslim mob set the coaches alight. Modi declared it a terrorist attack by Muslims and did little to defuse the tension. In the following days, Hindu mobs killed around 2,000 Muslims, some of them burned alive, women raped and mutilated, while police stood by. Promising free-market reforms, in 2014 Modi won the first of two general elections, but his autocratic style, bias against Muslims in his Citizenship Act and clumsy economic reforms revealed that he was as careless as the Nehrus, only less tolerant of minorities.

At 2 p.m. on 2 May 2011, as the Arab Spring gathered momentum, the calm of a walled mansion in north-eastern Pakistan, not far from the capital Islamabad, was broken by the distant whirl of helicopters.

WHERE LIONS AND CHEETAHS LURK

Two US Blackhawks bearing, in Obama’s words, ‘twenty-three members of the Seal team, a Pakistani American CIA translator and a military dog named Cairo’ were taking part in Operation Neptune Spear. Obama joined his staff in the White House Situation Room as the choppers flew low over Pakistan. As they approached the mansion, one of the helicopters went down.

It was Obama’s hardest decision. The CIA had informed him that at a mysterious fortified house, linked to Osama bin Laden by two of his couriers, they had been watching a tall man walk in the tiny garden. ‘We call him the Pacer,’ said the lead officer. ‘We think he could be bin Laden.’ Obama consulted his cohorts: Vice-President Biden ‘weighed in against the raid, given the enormous consequences of failure’. But Obama approved the mission against bin Laden, tactlessly codenamed Geronimo.

At home, Michelle endured the stress of politics. ‘I sensed an undercurrent of tension in her, subtle but constant,’ recalled Obama, ‘like the faint thrum of a hidden machine.’ He saw ‘part of her stayed on alert, waiting and watching for the next turn of the wheel, bracing herself for calamity’. Sometimes ‘the lions and cheetahs started to lurk’, wrote Michelle. ‘When you’re married to the president you come to understand quickly that the world brims with chaos …’

They sensed a coming darkness, a backlash against their liberal values – and they were right. In 2010, a tall, wide-hipped property developer with an auburn tan and a bright-yellow combover started to consider running for president against Obama. Donald Trump, then aged sixty-four, was already the personification of American illusion – grandson of a Bavarian immigrant and gold-rush brothel-keeper, son of a post-war Queens slum landlord. Using his billion-dollar inheritance, he became a developer of luxury Manhattan hotels and Atlantic City casinos, funded by junk bonds, constantly refinanced on the edge of bankruptcy and paying scarcely any tax on his loss-making ventures. In the 1980s, he had promoted the myth of this dealmaking with a bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, which in 2004 won him the job of presenting a TV reality show, The Apprentice. His new fame enabled him to reinvigorate his Trump franchise.

Husband of three glamorous women – a Czech skier, an American model and a Slovene model – patriarch of a business dynasty, lover of a bazzoon of Playboy centrefolds and porn performers, this bombastic bazooka of complex inferiority would put on a fake voice and, claiming to be his own publicist, ring newspapers to tell them that ‘the Donald’ was having affairs with supermodels and popstars. While having an affair with his future second wife, he had quoted her praise of his sexual virtuosity to give the New York Post one of its most memorable headlines: ‘BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD’. He was a fairground huckster, for whom the truth mattered less than the spectacle, and expertise or knowledge were contemptible, but he had a gift for articulating what millions were thinking. As a ‘killer’, never a ‘loser’, he had long coveted power: in 1987, he had taken out advertisements offering to negotiate arms limitation with Gorbachev. Steeped in the seamy dealmaking of New York property, with its hints of Mafia pay-offs, long mocked in New York high society, he had built a Monopoly set of golden tower buildings, altogether achieving much more than most politicians had ever attempted before they came to office.