If Donald Trump were in almost any other country but America, a year into his presidency he would have been wearing a (fake) military uniform complete with fake medals.

The direction he wants to take the US is becoming clearer by the day.

No one arrested on American soil has ever been sent to Guantánamo Bay. Donald Trump’s America says why not, the more the better.

No one captured by American forces on foreign soil has been sent to Guantánamo Bay since 2008. Let’s restart, says Donald Trump and his section of America.

The November 1 New York truck attack by Uzbek-born Sayfullo Saipov has laid bare the kind of America Donald Trump wants to live in and to lead.

It must:

• kill all “bad hombres”
• outsource judicial processes to the military
• remain ethnically/ culturally pure
• allow a strong man to look after the whole country without let or hindrance, sans argument or question
• and it must be selfishly focussed on its own wellbeing.

There is almost no other explanation for the US president’s denunciation of the US criminal justice system as “a joke” and “a laughingstock”, his ill-advised description of Saipov as “this animal” and his enthusiasm for sending him to the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay.

Inside draft-dodger Donald Trump may be a wannabe general struggling to get out.