The Kavanaugh-Trump bond has been sealed – and now there's no telling what else the US justice system will turn a blind eye to

If voters of both genders leave the House of Representatives in Republican hands on 6 November, it’s hard to imagine what else the president will be emboldened to let slide

A year almost to the day since the Harvey Weinstein story broke, how timely and touching it was to find a Me Too offshoot being launched in the East Room of the White House.

Strikingly similar to the original in almost every respect, #MenToo is for the traumatised victims of sexual assault allegations. Victims like Donald Trump and his new Supreme Court justice, Brett Kavanaugh.

The ceremony’s official purpose was to enable the former to swear in the latter. But since the real swearing-in had already happened elsewhere, it is safe to assume that the ritual had a couple of less cosmetic functions.

One was as a reminder that if any man alive knows Kavanaugh’s pain, it is Trump. “On behalf of our nation, I want to apologise to Kavanaugh and the entire Kavanaugh family for the terrible pain and suffering you have been forced to endure,” he began, the fellow-sufferer empathy speaking for itself as he spoke in subtle code for himself.

This was the first public apology of his presidency, and only the second of a notoriously unscandalous life. He withdrew the previous one (for the harmless frat boy banter about grabbing women by the you-know-what), later claiming it was someone else’s voice on the tape. This one looks a keeper.

In its broader tonal sense, it wasn’t that original. When political leaders offer apologies, they are usually for offences committed by others (Tony Blair selflessly taking the rap for Bloody Sunday, for instance, but not so much for Iraq).

Even so, hearing Trump say sorry for anything – and on behalf of the entire Yoo-Knighted States! – was almost as moving as his elegy to natural justice.

“Those who step forward to serve our country deserve a fair and dignified evaluation, not a campaign of political and personal destruction based on lies and deception,” the terracotta dotard continued to unironic applause.

“In our country, a man or woman must always be presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. And with that, I must state that you, sir, under historic scrutiny, were proven innocent.”

It was at this point that one felt a tiny twinge of regret that no legal expert was on hand to correct him. Had a justice of the Supreme Court been present, I would imagine she or he would have butted in with, “Respectfully, Mr President, I must set you straight. I understand the confusion, because even a stable genius layman lacks the intensive legal training to distinguish a sham FBI investigation from a jury verdict of not guilty.

“But Mr Kavanaugh has not been proven innocent. There is no proof that he did not assault Christine Blasey Ford and others, and a plurality of the Americans on whose behalf you so graciously apologised a few moments ago trust her word over his. Just sayin’…”

Yet this is no time for splitting hairs. If you choose pedantry over raising a keg of beer to the altruistic courage of these two, as they stretched a supporting arm out to all the other men falsely smeared by evil women gratifying a death threat fetish – well, what happened to your humanity?

Tear-jerking as the support-group-launch element to the event absolutely was, its second function has even happier implications. This was the first mafia induction ceremony ever televised. Without pricking his thumb and dripping blood onto a picture of the Virgin Mary, Kavanaugh became a made man on Monday.

For a while, he seemed destined to reprise Joe Pesci’s part in Goodfellas by getting iced rather than made. But after he treated the congressional committee to his equally demented version of “Do I amuse you? Am I a clown?”, 49 Republican senators and a lone Democrat intent on reserving his berth in Dante’s lost circle of hell concluded the bullets were better directed at Ford and the countless other female false memory syndrome sufferers.

As a soldier in the Trump family, Kavanaugh will be expected to show his loyalty if and when the question of whether a sitting president is subject to the law reaches the court. He might turn rat, of course, and swings the Supremes to decide that using campaign funds to pay off a truculent gumar counts as a federal crime for him, as for anyone else.

But the hunch is that the bond of shared victimhood Trump tightened yesterday will be too deep and strong for that. If anyone looks primed to obey the omerta gripping the Republican party in which he’s been a partisan for decades, it is Kavanaugh.

Two snarling, shouty, entitled sons of privilege gazing lovingly at one another while the woman who Trump called a “credible witness” last week – but accused of perpetrating a hoax and a “disgraceful fabrication” last night – is too petrified by the death threats to go home… What a Trumpland vignette this was as the mid-terms approach.

If after this voters of both genders leave the House of Representatives in Republican hands on 6 November, it’s hard to imagine what he won’t be emboldened to do. A pardon for Weinstein, his #MenToo soulmate, might be the least of it.

With both halves of Congress in his power, and Kavanaugh fulfilling the capo di tutti capo’s wettest dream as Don Donaldo’s guy on the bench, may God, as our own judges used to say on donning the black cap, have mercy on our souls.