By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

During the early amateurish months of Donald Trump's presidency, I asked America's former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper what he made of revelations Republicans had colluded with Russians to sabotage Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign.

The similarities with a previous era seemed patent, including the theft of Democratic National Committee files.

Essentially, I wanted to know, was this "break-in" as big as Watergate, the apex scandal of criminality and cover-up against which future political stories would be measured.

The law-breaking of the Nixon White House had plumbed new lows for American democracy but also enabled one of journalism's finest hours.

"If you compare the two Watergate pales, really, in my view, compared to what we're confronting now," Clapper told me forthrightly in 2017 at the National Press Club.

"I lived through Watergate. I was on active duty then in the Air Force. I was a young officer. It was a scary time."

Clapper's clarity went around the world and made headlines in the US.

A "scary time" but not half as scary as now, I'd wager.

Trump Mk II seems to have matured and metastasised within America's ailing body-politic whereas Joe Biden, the Democrat who bested him in 2020, simply seems closer to leaving his own body.

More staggering again, Biden's crack team has studiously unlearned the lessons it took from 2016 into that victorious 2020 fight.

Friday's presidential debate was a dismal cluster of own goals beginning with the crazy decision to hold it at all, four months before polling day.

If the idea was to relive Biden's 2020 success, why did Democrats agree to a debate format in which no audience was present, no contemporaneous fact-checking would be done, and Trump's microphone would be muted while Biden was fumbling through his uncertain replies?

Wasn't the lesson from four years ago that the bombastic Trump could be made to defeat himself?

Wasn't it that a vulgar narcissist cannot resist playing to a live audience, and that his volcanic rudeness and schoolyard boasts would turn voters off in droves?

This time, Trump still went with a blizzard of lies and risible self-praise, but Biden failed to capitalise and it was he who looked least equipped to rule.

The format changes - particularly his muted mic - wound up protecting Trump from himself, while highlighting Biden's mounting incapacities.

Experience shows there will be no recovery from this. An already widespread fear the 81-year-old is not up to the campaign, let alone a new four years from January 2025, has been graphically reinforced.

Biden has achieved something unusual in the dynamics of electoral decision-making. He has emerged as both incumbent and risk. Normally, it is the alternative candidate who must overcome the voters' fear of the unknown, must ask them to take a leap of faith.

Somehow, against a serial lying felon (to be sentenced this week) who still denies the last election result (which had deadly consequences) Biden ensured it was Trump who emerged as the more reliable figure.

It is ironic that the last incumbent to frighten voters more than the change option was Trump himself. It was why Biden won.

As a patriot, the President now has one course of action: retire gracefully and ask the Democrats to install a candidate who can counter Trump. There are many options.

American democracy cannot be assumed. As Nick Bryant reminds us in his superbly timed book The Forever War: America's unending war with itself, the world's apex republic has never actually had much of a democracy. Indeed, its electoral machinery has been deliberately compartmentalised and constitutionally circumscribed. Right from the beginning majority rule has been attenuated, even feared.

Founding father and second US president, John Adams, worried "the tyranny of the majority" was inherently unsustainable, warning "there never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide".

Two-hundred-and-ten years later, Americans might just be on the verge of electing a rule-breaking autocrat who has established a process called Project 2025 which explicitly aims to install MAGA loyalists in all the key public service posts, including the judiciary and law enforcement.

"It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration," Project 2025 explains on its website.

Day one, you'll remember, is the only day Trump has (half) joked he would be a dictator.

Of course, it would not end there. As Biden's pig-headed insistence on continuing shows so clearly, powerful men rarely cede their power voluntarily.

The outlines of Trump's second presidency can already be seen in a more deliberate methodology and a stated determination to avoid appointing establishment conservatives to his cabinet and key public posts. This time it will be all cultists.

In 2016, even Trump was surprised he won. This time, it would be no surprise at all, not to him, not to his backers, and not to his idol, Vladimir Putin.

"I think the Russians would much prefer to have Donald Trump in the White House," Clapper remarked on Saturday.

Watergate would look like a picnic.

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.