If your answer to me is a whispered, confiding "Yes, Ian, I do talk to portraits," then I leap to tell you that you are in famous company. What you are doing is something President Richard 'Tricky Dick' Nixon is famously reported to have done in his bitter twilight times in the White House.

Portraits of former presidents festoon the White House and Nixon talked to them. In the twilight of his poisoned presidency they may have been his only friends.

Reminders of this poignant part of Nixon's decline are everywhere at the moment. In the digital labyrinths where your columnist does his political reading there is a flurry of comparisons of the nastinesses of the Nixon and Trump presidencies. After a blizzard of scandals over Nixon's "dirty tricks" Nixon resigned the presidency on August 9, 1974.

For these comparisons Nixon is being looked at again and anew. He even makes an ectoplasmic comeback in a new post by The Simpsons. You can see it online by Googling "Watch Richard Nixon's Ghost Visit Donald Trump." Nixon's tricky spectre explains "I came to thank you, Donald. I'm moving up. Thanks to you, I'm now the 44th-best president [0f the 45 there have been]!"

Generally, in these comparisons (the best of them being made by folk old enough, like me, to well remember the Nixon Era) Trump is not doing well. Nixon is thought classier by far. One headline declaring Donald Trump Is The New Richard Nixon – Without The Brains sums up the mood of these analyses.

One envies US thinkers the scope to make these sorts of comparisons. We never do much of the same with our past and present PMs, perhaps because their personalities and careers are (with the exception of the towering Gough) not consequential enough for us to be bothered. Perhaps one could, just, imagine the ghost of Billy McMahon (poor prime minister from March 1971 to December 1972, dying in 1988) materialising in the bedroom of PM Tony Abbott (dreadful prime minister from September 2013 to September 2015) to thank him. The ectoplasmic Billy says "I came to thank you, Tony. Thanks to you I'm now only Australia's second-worst prime minister."

One well-informed maker of the Trump/Nixon comparisons is Nixon authority Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland. He has just told The Nation that Trump and Nixon are unalike. For example while Trump seems always to have had a sex life (the reliable New York Post has run a story quoting a woman saying her sex with Trump was "the best sex I ever had") poor Nixon was famously under sexed. Perlstein can remember Hunter S. Thompson asking Nixon on the campaign trail in New Hampshire in 1968 if he, Nixon, "had had his annual orgasm yet".

Less frivolously, Perlstein thinks that Nixon would abhor Trump's boasts that he is going to defeat ISISquickly, that he is going to bring back the jobs now.

"He [Nixon] would really be disgusted with that," Perlstein is sure.

"Nixon was a planner. He was very careful. He played the long game. He had a very long attention span. Trump is the guy who can't even sit in a meeting without tweeting, who has the attention span of a soap bubble."

These same digital labyrinths where I follow US politics are ringing with impeachment speculation. In the unlikely event of there being a God then He must be surprised to be hearing from atheistic me as (desperate to try anything) I pray for Him to engineer Trump's impeachment. For mere Congressional mankind impeachments are almost impossible to engineer.

But our better hope, optimistic Max B. Sawicky soothsays in his essay Trump, Pumped and Dumpedfor The Baffler is that we won't need impeachment. It's likely this "clueless" idiot will soon resign. Sawicky catalogues the ever-accumulating torrent of investigations, failures and domestic and international ridiculing Trump is going to suffer.

"This will profoundly demoralise Trump, who thrives on personal adulation," Sawicky diagnoses.

"He will look back wistfully on his old, lost life of conspicuous consumption and shameless debauchery. The presidency will no longer be any fun for him. It will be possible to persuade him to resign, or for him to persuade himself to resign."

"What do you think? Dare we hope for it to happen?" I hear myself pleading with the portrait on my study wall. It is an original painting of the face of the Green Man, the pagan Nature deity. He has lush green foliage for hair and a beard of leaves.

Green Man says nothing. And yet just as Nixon knew Abraham Lincoln the oil painting was paying attention to him I swear I see the Green Man giving an affirming nod of the divine shrubbery his godly head. Green Man is never wrong! Soap Bubble Man's presidential days are surely numbered.