Each day with Donald Trump as US president brings a new outrage and a fresh slew of norm-shredding acts

(The letter is here: ‘The more the glitterati rail at Trump the bigger he will win’).

Mr Hutchins has, either by design or by accident, employed a new tactic of Donald Trump’s outriders, one that seeks to silence opposition to his ongoing assault on the American constitution by weaponising, against those opponents, the prospect of Trump securing four more years as the world’s most powerful individual.

Nobody should be under any illusions: Trump is an aspiring despot possessing more than an idle interest in fascism (as a method of governance, at the very least) and his corrosive impact on liberal democracy across the globe is clear to anyone willing to look.

Each day brings a new outrage, and a fresh slew of pathological falsehoods and petulant, aberrant, norm-shredding acts.

All of us have a duty to stand, in whatever way we see fit, against the likes of Trump, whose disregard for even the most basic tenets of a pluralist society is staggering in its scale.

The alternative is acquiescence and consent.

In his missive, Mr Hutchins laid out a populist’s menu of apparent subversives.

He should be assured that antipathy towards Trump’s current and future plans runs significantly wider than the Democratic Party, ‘glitterati gladiators’ (whatever they are) and academics, who are, of course, always bound to appear on lists of this flavour.

Matthew Coyle, Holywood