AT THE height of Silvio Berlusconi’s power, as the billionaire-politician brushed scandals and lawsuits aside with the ease of a crocodile gliding through duckweed, a professor at an Italian university described to Lexington how the terms furbo and fesso helped explain the then-prime minister’s survival. In those bits of Italian society from which Mr Berlusconi drew his strongest support, it is a high compliment to be deemed a furbo, or a sly, worldly wise-guy. The furbo knows how to jump queues, dodge taxes and play systems of nepotism and patronage like a Stradivarius. In contrast the fesso is the chump who waits his turn and fails to grasp how badly the system is rigged, or how much of his taxes will be stolen. The fesso might cheer a new clean-air law in his city, naively taking an announcement by the elites at face value. The furbo wonders who in the environment department may have a brother-in-law with a fat contract to supply chimney scrubbers. Mr Berlusconi’s fans saw him as the furbo to end all furbi. He showed that he heard them, offering them crude appeals to wise-guy cynicism, as when he asserted that any Italians who backed his centre-left opponents were not just mistaken, but were coglioni or, to translate loosely, “dickheads”, who would be voting “against their own interests”.

Living in that sort of society comes with costs. For decades anthropologists and political scientists have weighed the advantages of living in a high-trust, highly transparent country like Sweden, and measured how corruption and squandered human capital harm places like Sicily. “Trust”, a book published by Francis Fukuyama 20 years ago and now sadly topical again, suggested that America and its distinctive model of capitalism flourished because strangers learned to trust one another when signing contracts, allowing them to do deals outside the circles of family, tribal or in-group kinship relied upon in low-trust societies.

As the Trump era dawns in America, the composition of the cabinet and inner circle taking shape around Donald Trump is too ideologically incoherent to define the next president’s policy agenda. There are bomb-throwers and hardliners in Team Trump, including cabinet secretaries who have called for the federal agencies they will run to be hobbled or abolished, and an alarming number of men who see no harm in threatening a trade war or two. But it also has figures from the oak-panelled, marble-pillared heart of the Republican establishment.

When it comes to national security, Mr Trump’s nominee to run the Pentagon is a retired general, James Mattis, who has called Russia’s annexation of Crimea a “severe” threat and accused President Vladimir Putin of wanting to “break NATO apart”. His pick to run the State Department, Rex Tillerson, is CEO of an oil firm, ExxonMobil, that argued against sanctions imposed on Russia after the Crimean invasion. Mr Trump’s Office of Management and Budget is to be run by a shrink-the-government fiscal conservative, Representative Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, while his chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, has called for a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan that will drive conservatives “crazy”. It is equally easy to imagine headlines, years from now, that call President Trump a revolutionary who took America down the path to hard-edged nationalism, as it is to imagine a hapless incompetent paralysed by factional in-fighting and plunging poll ratings.

If Mr Trump’s policies are a mystery, his approach to politics is not. The Republican won office by systematically undermining trust in any figure or institution that seemed to stand in his way, from Republican rivals to his Democratic opponent, leaders of Congress, business bosses, the news media, fact-checkers or simply those fessi who believe in paying taxes. Accused of avoiding federal income taxes during a debate with Hillary Clinton, he growled: “That makes me smart.”

Mr Trump will not be able to stop that destructive mission to make America less like Sweden and more like Sicily. He has too many promises that he cannot keep. He must betray those supporters whom he wooed with a conspiracy theory dressed up as an economic policy, backed with crude invective worthy of an American Berlusconi. He spotted a market opportunity: millions of Americans with conservative instincts, notably working-class whites in the Midwest, who felt ill-served by both major parties and could conceive of no benign explanation for social and economic changes that angered and dismayed them. Mr Trump ignored transformational forces, such as automation or global competition. He dismissed the notion that foreign policy is filled with complex trade-offs. Instead Mr Trump told voters a story about “stupid” and feckless elites who had given away what was rightfully theirs: from manufacturing jobs to traditional values or a border secure against illegal immigrants and Muslim terrorists. Just give him power, and all would be well.

Get smart

Fomenting cynicism and partisan divisions is not a flaw in Mr Trump’s approach to politics: it is his best chance of surviving the next four or eight years, as reality bites. That is why he has told his supporters not to believe the CIA, when American spy chiefs accuse Russia of working to disrupt the election by hacking e-mails sent by bosses at the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. It is why Mr Trump has recently held rallies in states that he won, telling supporters, “We are really the people that love this country” and breezily saying of crowd chants to lock Mrs Clinton up: “That plays great before the election, now we don’t care.” As a man about to break his word, Mr Trump needs an America in which all morals are relative, facts are written by winners and principles count for less than winking appeals to partisan loyalty. Most of the Trump legacy is still unknowable. Some of what he does will be reversed by the next president when the electoral pendulum swings the other way, as it usually does. A lower-trust America will be harder to fix.