Enter through the sparkling courtyard, climb the huge staircase – the kind a Renaissance lord could ride his horse up – and cross the throne hall to a shady salon on the first floor. With its view of the Apennine foothills, the ducal palace in Urbino, in the Marche region of Italy, seems a long way from the Washington swamp. Yet for aspiring apparatchiks in today’s America, the road to the White House runs through this echoing room. Five hundred years ago, beneath its vaulted ceiling, a formula for political success was distilled. According to Baldassare Castiglione, a diplomat and author, a group of Italian nobles met here to establish “what manner of man he ought to be who may deserve to be called a perfect Courtier”.

Critics of Donald Trump’s administration often liken it to a royal court and his aides to courtiers. So do the president’s allies and the man himself: “Long Live the King!” Trump proclaimed of himself in February on Truth Social. They all have a point, thinks Francis Fukuyama, a professor of political science at Stanford University. Typically in a patrimonial or court system, a warrior figure “conquers some territory and then begins to reward his friends and family with land and women and so forth”. Power does not depend on hierarchies and job titles but on intimacy with the ruler. Politics is a factional struggle for his trust and attention; his whims can make or break your career, your fortune – and perhaps your neck. No distinction is made between his interests and the state’s.

This sort of regime was “the dominant form of government for most of human history”, Fukuyama explains to me. Only recently did a bureaucratic system, based on laws and merit, replace it in the West. But because rewarding friends and family is a natural instinct, the modern model is fragile, constantly in danger of slipping back into the old ways. That, Fukuyama reckons, is what is happening in America now. Foreign potentates arrive at the White House bearing tributes like medieval supplicants (Sir Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, brought an invitation from an actual king, Charles III). Right-wing influencers who have Trump’s ear wield more clout than cabinet secretaries. Rules and judges are irksome encumbrances