Donald Trump has come to test the resolve of the Founding Fathers. This could be an episode of Doctor Who

If Trump and Bannon continue on this path, law enforcers will face a choice between obeying a judge or their President. If they side with the latter, horrendous civil unrest would follow. The integrity of American civil society would be in peril

Donald Trump and Steve Bannon during the swearing-in ceremony of senior staff at the White House last month (AFP/Getty)

In the early hours of 9 November, moments after CNN called it for Donald Trump, my son had an idea for a Doctor Who episode. Inspired by the lashings of Famous Grouse which sustained us through a hellish night in Edinburgh, where yesterday he was among the soul-lifting thousands protesting the Muslim travel ban, he suggested this plot (copyright: Louis Norman, 2016).

The Doctor pitches up in Philadelphia on 16 September 1787, the day before the US Constitution was signed. He rounds up its creators – Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, et al – ushers them into the Tardis, and brings them to our present, where he invites them to acquaint themselves with Donald J Trump. “So, Founding Fathers,” he says when they’re done, “is there anything you’d care to rethink?”

That dismal, drunken night, I reckoned they’d have left it as it was. Now, in sober reflection, I still think the same.

That collection of ungodly geniuses wrote the US Constitution with the threat of a despotic demagogue in their forefront of their mighty minds. The dual government system that counterbalances President with Congress causes problems of its own, but the fathers calculated legislative gridlock as a cheap price to pay to prevent a President becoming a de facto monarch after the fashion of George III.

There is a third branch to their tripartite system. Given that the Republicans, who control both Houses of Congress, are as cowardly a clique of moral invertebrates as any modern democracy has known, resistance rests with the judiciary.

Even before his election, you could have predicted that Trump’s disregard for human and legal rights would take him to war with the judiciary, but not that the opening shots would be fired so soon. On Saturday, law enforcers ignored a federal judge’s order that detainees under the President’s executive order must have access to lawyers. Whether due to airport chaos or fear of angering Trump, the rule of law was visibly breaking down barely a week after he took office.

With a new tranche of executive orders expected imminently, I’m reminded of a line from a farcically deranged hotelier of an earlier vintage than Trump. “Well, then, what are you going to do now?” Basil Fawlty asks Manuel after a typical cock-up leads to the erection (remind you of anything in the Hispanic context?) of an unwanted wall. “Que?” “What. You. Do. Now?”

What. Trump. Does. Next. will be determined by Trump’s svengali, Steve Bannon, the alleged anti-Semite, white supremacist and pathological warmonger who overruled objections to extend the Muslim Ban to green card holders. Bannon, who is reportedly running the Trump show, has been drafted to the National Security Council in place of one of those know-nothing four-star Generals. Nuclear bunker, anyone?

Bannon’s time running Breitbart suggests he has as much respect for the judiciary as for innocent dark-skinned travellers. When Chief Justice John Roberts, the Diana Ross of these Supremes, cast his swing vote to save Obamacare, Breitbart called him a disgrace and a traitor to conservatism. If you didn’t enjoy our tabloids’ demonisation of the judiciary over its Brexit judgments, you can multiply by 10 the US “alternative fact” media’s vitriol if and when the Supreme Court overturns a presidential executive order.

And it has to be when. The Supremes have been a justice light since Antonin Scalia, the Davros of jurisprudence, died last year. But even when Trump replaces him to give the conservatives a 5-4 edge over the liberals, the Roberts who saved Obamacare will not vote for anything as plainly unconstitutional as the Muslim travel ban.

What happens then, like so much else in this vast expanse of unmapped territory, is unknowable.

The Trump-Bannon axis seems unlikely to accept a judicial rebuke with the best of grace. At Breitbart, Bannon played a key role in so diminishing trust in traditional media – those bits that prefer verifiable fact to wild conspiracy theory – that a post-truth president became possible. He and his compadres will wage a similar guerrilla campaign to destroy faith in the judiciary, and the dangers of that speak chillingly for themselves.

There are other and scarier dangers. If Trump-Bannon continues on this path, law enforcers will face more choices between obeying a judge or their President. If they side with the latter, horrendous civil unrest would follow. The integrity of American civil society would be in peril.

Instinctively, it feels like this cannot continue go on for long; the g-force produced by such hurtling pace is almost literally breakneck. No system of government has the elasticity to endure such pulverising tension between its components without snapping.

Along with the judiciary, there are other constitutional protectives. There is impeachment, and the less cumbersome method of removing a President dictated by the 25th Amendment, which legalises mutiny. And, in 22 months, the mid-term elections will probably reinforce the shackles by returning the Senate, and possibly the House, to Democratic control.

But 22 hours in the lifetime of this administration is an aeon. With Trump under Bannon’s spell, an irresistible internal dynamic is propelling the coming battle between the President and the document he satirically pledged to protect 11 days ago towards a brutal conclusion.

The framers built a towering wall against a tyrant. Build it, and he will come. Well, he has come – and we wait to discover if this is one wall that will make Donald Trump pay.

Is the Constitution of Thomas Jefferson and co strong enough to restrain, and if necessary crush, a President gone rogue from the start? I suspect we’ll know the answer long before the great Peter Capaldi regenerates into the 13th Doctor on Christmas Day.