‘Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich’

But that’s just part of it. His fingers, too, are ‘long and beautiful’. Improbably coiffed, perma-tanned and bronze-tongued, the Donald has increasingly impinged on the world’s consciousness through a string of startling pronouncements.

From his preference for war heroes who have not been captured, to his references to his sleeping around in the 1980s as his ‘personal Vietnam’ or this - ‘My grandparents didn’t come to America all the way from Germany to see it get taken over by immigrants’ - Trump’s utterances are nothing if not intriguing.

As he once said, and to date this has been hard to dispute, he ‘could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and [he] wouldn’t lose any voters.’

Here, in his own words, is the businessmen, the dealmaker, TV personality, author and one-time Democrat, now Republican who would be president of the United States.