But why is Trump so loathsome? What is it that has formed and that sustains his sheer "grab 'em by the pussy" nastiness and callousness? Where does it come from, this personality (or perhaps absence of personality, this vacuum where a personality should be) that so offends and depresses everyone of even average decency, average refinement?

Readers, I think I've at last worked out what it is, at least for me, in my case. See if my theory floats your own gondola.

My sense that Trump and I are not even of the same species may be due to the fact that I am an avid reader, especially of fiction while Trump reads nothing, and never has.

I have been reading in the online The Atlantic David A Graham’s piece The President Who Doesn't Read: Trump’s allergy to the written word.

Graham, one of many commentators marvelling at inability/disinclination to read, is preoccupied by the way in which Trump's "allergy to the written word" keeps the president pig-ignorant of information a president ought to have if he's to make informed decisions.

Graham quotes a Trump economic adviser confiding, gasping, "It’s worse than you can imagine … Trump won't read anything - not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing".

But of course it's the fact that he doesn't read books (he fibs that he reads the Bible but his famous ignorance of its contents suggests that he never has) and so never reads any literary fiction, that has the bigger ramifications for his vile mind.

The now famous 2013 study by the New School in New York City (published in the journal Science) showing that reading literary fiction sensitises us to others' lives, thoughts, feelings and plights only confirmed what all readers of fine fiction always knew in their bones.

Reading fine fiction acquaints us, sympathetically, with folk quite unlike ourselves. We learn to feel empathy for them. One never bumps into any Madame Bovarys at the local shops or plays mixed doubles with any Anna Kareninas at the local tennis club.

None of us has a Mr Darcy for a workmate, there is never a proud Elizabeth Bennet among the giggling sheilas of our Aqua Aerobics class. There is never a deranged and obsessive sea captain pursuing a mystical White Whale across the waters of our local Lake Burley Griffin. We never rub shoulders with a grieving and tormented Prince of Denmark when we have a Christmas family gathering (although Uncle Geoff has his issues). And yet there are grieving and tormented people galore in the wider world and Shakespeare’s Hamlet enables us to rub virtual, empathetic shoulders with a representative of them.

In my Shakespeare play-reading group I was required one morning to read the parts of and to imagine being Antony and then Cleopatra and then The Eunuch. This put me in their unfamiliar shoes (and in the case of Cleopatra put me into her unfamiliar and very feminine regalia and in the case of the Eunuch put my manly, deep-voiced self into his unfamiliar plight).

Those of us who diligently read literary fiction are, in a sense, what we read.

My reading of the fiction of Alice Munro (deservedly 2013’s Nobel Laureate) deepens my understanding of how the most simple-seeming folk living what may look like uneventful lives are in fact leading lives of (sometimes slow-moving, sometimes slowly-unfolding) drama, complexity, delights and tragedies.

All thinking, sensitive people have Donald Trump nightmares. But in my case, and in addition to the commonplace nightmares we all have of him starting World War Three with a tantrum there are for me the nightmares in which he and I are stuck alone together for very long times.

In these dreams we are sometimes marooned together on a desert island and sometimes marooned together aboard a jetliner on a long, long, nonstop international flight (in the latter case and in the surreal forms dreams can take we are flying from Queanbeyan to its sister city Pyongyang).

These scenarios are nightmares because in waking life all of us, readers, who have bubbling, learning-loving, ideas-juggling minds can tell that after about five minutes of attempting conversation with Trump we'd be bored sh--less by him.

So it comes to pass that, in my dreams stuck alone with this bore, we have absolutely nothing to talk about after he's tried in vain to impress me with his "pussy" anecdotes. It is then, on the island or aboard the jetliner between Queanbeyan and Kim Jong-un’s North Korean paradise) that I am reminded of how civilised people are their reading, how ideas (and sometimes dogs, too) are their favourite things.

Someone who does no worthwhile reading and hence can do no reading-inspired thinking does not even seem to be a true member of our species. Print (one of our clever species' most magnificent inventions) is wasted on these zombies.

One might as well ask an indoor plant, or a spaniel, as ask Trump "Who's your favourite Austen heroine?" The plant, the spaniel and this present Leader of the Free World would all be similarly baffled by the question.