In less than two weeks’ time, the verdict of the American people on Donald Trump’s second term will be in. The sheer nastiness of the campaign — along with last week’s horror attack on Australian MP Helen Haines — should give us our own moment to pause and reflect on the direction of our new era of politics.

In the US, the Democrats are confident. “Republicans’ path to keeping control of the House has all but evaporated,” said the independent, non-partisan Cook Political Report. Meanwhile, polling website Race to the WH, which has correctly predicted the Senate race in the last three elections, calculates a 72 per cent chance the Democrats could take the Senate, too.

The chief issue is the same one that helped Mr Trump return to the White House — the cost of living. The totem of this problem is fuel prices, which have shot to Biden-era pandemic highs thanks to Trump’s war in Iran, started in spite of his pledge not to start “Forever Wars”.

October will set the record for the most expensive month of US petrol prices ever. This record was also set for the last two months.

Unsurprisingly, the Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Mr Trump’s approval rating has tanked to a new low of 31 per cent, and his disapproval rating is at 66 per cent, up from 41 per cent at the time of his inauguration.

If the midterm results are bad for the Republicans, Mr Trump will no doubt attempt to spin his way out of them. But for now the record shows him having it both ways. He says he is not on the ballot, but he has poured enormous energy into rallying the MAGA faithful to turn out to vote, staging rallies in swing states and for key candidates.

One of those has been Vivek Ramaswamy, who, in a sign of the Republicans’ desperation, has taken US politics, polarisation and personal attacks to a new low. The candidate for governor of the state of Ohio released an ad featuring the mother of his Democratic rival, calling her daughter, Amy Acton, a liar.

But this was hardly political gold dust. Amy Acton and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody, when she was 12 years old, and their stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was charged with raping her. The last time Amy Acton set eyes on her mother in person was in the courtroom when her stepfather was arrested and indicted in 1978. He fled the state, evading prosecution, and died in 2004.

Amy Acton called the platforming of her mother “despicable” and “exploitative”.

That does not even cover it.

It is worth zooming out to appreciate what Mr Ramaswamy did.

He tried to frame his political opponent as a liar by exploiting a family breakdown triggered by her allegations of paedophilia at the hands of her stepfather. These claims were taken seriously enough in the late 1970s to warrant the removal of her and her brother from their mother’s care and led to a grand jury indictment.

Pitting family breakdowns into the political arena is gross at the most basic level, but to know it involves allegations of paedophilia is unforgivable, and it should especially disgust the MAGA supporters who pressed for the release of the Epstein Files.

Not that Ramaswamy, or the Republicans who matter, are even sorry. What they did next was worse. Instead of admitting the gross error of judgment and basic humanity, Vivek Ramaswamy claimed ownership and said he would spend $US4 million to air it.

When this tawdry affair reached the White House, what did the President and Vice President do?

“Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar,” US Vice President JD Vance said.

President Trump also cheered Vivek Ramaswamy on and told him to “ride with it”.

“I don’t care. If it were my mother speaking badly about me, you’d be making it the number one story on the news,” he told reporters.

“This has nothing to do with a stepfather or anything else. This has to do with the fact that a woman got out, the mother of a person running for governor of one of the greatest states, where I set records and said that she’s a liar.”

It has everything to do with the stepfather and far more.

Chris Christie, former Republican Governor of New Jersey, told the US ABC Network’s This Week: “This goes to the rotten moral core that Donald Trump has created for my party. And you then take probably two of the most prominent Trump wannabes in our party, JD Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, and what they’re showing America is, we want to be just as morally bankrupt as Trump.”

“This is the future of our party if we don’t get our act together: to have charmless people with no charisma and the lack of moral clarity and centre that Donald Trump has.”

“One of the long-term impacts from this year’s election will be for Republicans in general, and Vice President Vance in particular, defending an ad that attempted to seek political gain from the rape of an underage girl,” Doug Sosnik, who advised then President Bill Clinton, told The Nightly.

Endorsing an attack ad over child rape is surely the end state of Donald Trump’s vitriolic brand of politics, which began with casual but still eyebrow-raising insults like “Crooked Hillary” and corrosive conspiracy theory questioning of opponents, such as the citizenship of the first Black president, Barack Obama.

Mr Trump’s success has been to execute so many shocking tactics that the public has become numb and desensitised to the gradual but now clear erasure of any standards in public life and campaigning.

In the United States, where political violence, just like gun violence, has become an accepted part of their culture, assassination attempts are hardly irregular. High-profile attempts have been made on President Trump himself, former speaker Nancy Pelosi and the US Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. January 6 and the presidential pardoning of those convicted for their insurrection crimes has all but given a green light to anyone else contemplating violent methods.

But those outside America do not have to accept this as their destiny.

MAGA’s exploitation of child rape should serve as a midterm moment for all those involved in public life and setting standards, and especially for those abroad who think copying the Make America Great Again formula will make them electorally successful at home.

Well before Helen Haines’ attacker was identified in the media, and his social media posts, which show an assortment of far-left and pro-climate change leanings, were exposed, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson rushed to News 24 airwaves to concede an error.

This related to a cartoon she had published on social media mocking independent Senator Jacqui Lambie for a health condition. She said she now believed the cartoon was not appropriate, that she had not seen it herself and that it would be taken down. Originally, she had told Senator Lambie to “lighten up,” despite now claiming she had not seen it before it went out.

Weeks earlier, she was on the back foot over a cartoon that called the former SAS Captain and federal Liberal MP Andrew Hastie a traitor. Ms Hanson is not the only one reassessing. The Labor Cabinet Minister Clare O’Neill in February deleted a post in which she referenced being ready to “smash some Liberals” having just “smashed” a Pilates class. She removed the post that afternoon, after it, rightly, triggered an outcry.

Words do matter. On the weekend, Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett said as plainly as a public servant could that the AFP monitors a direct relationship between those cartoons and an uptick in threats made against politicians.

On X, Pauline Hanson shot back: “The Please Explain cartoons have nothing to do with the tragic attack on Helen Haines. They will not be going anywhere,” she said. Senator Hanson, who blocks the ABC and The Guardian from press events, accused her critics of wanting to censor her.

These same cartoons have depicted former Labor Victorian premier Dan Andrews being run over and independent Senator Lidia Thorpe under the wheels of a vehicle. If these are meant to be jokes, Senator Hanson can and should find better ways to make the public laugh. Her cartoons have been an innovation in political communication and an effective way of skewering government incompetence when others have been too timid; to ensure their continued success, she needs to enforce better quality control to ensure that they don’t become a liability.

This has zero to do with cancelling or censoring. And it certainly does not mean letting our political leaders off the hook when they are performing badly. It should be clear that if you need to depict harm to your opponent, mock their health or accuse them of treachery, whatever political argument you were trying to make was long lost. Being nasty is not clever, and we are about to find out if it is even electorally successful for President Trump and his acolytes.

You don’t need an intelligence officer to tell you that in our hyper-connected world, the path to online radicalisation is now so swift and silent that it can be easy to miss. It can happen in days. The metric of political content is not whether the target of the attack should have big enough shoulders, but whether the content could inspire or even incite someone who is disaffected, mentally disturbed or prone to radical ideologies.

Australians have always been able to biff with vigour and do it well. The nation hardly has a reputation for being shrinking violets. So as Americans prepare to have their say on President Trump’s methods, so too can we.