A recent photograph of Barack and Michelle Obama and their lovely daughters Sasha and Malia attending a state dinner for the Canadian Prime Minister reminded me once again how elegant and appropriate America’s First Family are.

And now they’re leaving us with the deeply unsettling spectre of the Trump family taking up residence in the White House.

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The Trump women are inoffensive enough; Donald’s daughter Ivanka seems to be a bright polished young mother who has her own online fashion business, and a pink website featuring lame motivational quotes.

His wife Melania is also reportedly a very nice person, a former glamour model who has presumably put the days of being photographed in bikinis and furs on the tarmac behind her and now spends her time looking after their son Barron, with an oddly frozen facial expression that makes her appear to be slightly confused as to where she is.

(One comic on Twitter said the thing that scared him most about a Trump victory was having Melania squint at us for four years.)

Melania Trump (pictured with her husband and son, Barron) seems nice enough even if she is constantly squinting. Photo: Getty

But the sons, Donald Jnr and Eric. Unsurprisingly they work in their father’s business, saving them from the onerous task of original thinking. They are the entitled douches from central casting who dress like 1980s Wall Street bankers and shoot beautiful endangered animals.

They went on an African safari and shot a leopard. And an elephant. And then posted pictures of themselves proudly posing with their kill.

I wouldn’t be able to speak to someone who did that. If I was introduced, I’d just keep saying, “You shot a leopard you d***head” over and over again until they had me arrested.

Compare the pair: while the Obamas are the epitome of understated elegance and class, the Trumps … well …. the picture speaks for itself.

When I think of the White House and the first families past and present, I think of tradition, of propriety, of manners. The low key elegance and intelligence of the Kennedy era, or the Roosevelts, the Clintons. The class act that is Obama and his family. Everything that the exorable Donald Trump isn’t.

But let’s put his odious politics and hateful chauvinism aside for one moment and look at his appearance.

There’s a very funny video doing the rounds, with a US comedian presenting a beauty tutorial on how to achieve the Trump look, which consists of rimming the eyes with concealer that is 10 shades too pale, and then rubbing a bag of crushed Cheetos over the face.

Trump’s extreme, unhinged narcissism not only causes him to boast about his penis size in public, but he recently called a woman up on stage at one of his conventions and instructed her to touch his hair to prove that it was real.

The poor woman did as she was bid politely, but you could sense that she threw up in her mouth a little at having to touch that crusty pile of transplanted fairy floss.

Trump in the foyer of his Connecticut home in 1987. Photo: Getty

If the unthinkable happens and Trump does end up in the Oval office, the idea of he and Melania redecorating the White House also looms large. Vanity Fair has already made the very apt comparison of Trump’s gaudy gold and crystal 58 bedroom Mar-a-Lago mansion with the showy palace of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein.

Instead of Jackie Kennedy lighting the candles on an impeccably set dining table, there may be gold palm trees, and golf trophies and stuffed endangered animals staring down from their wall mounts.

And maybe a leopard rug? The leopard his sons shot.

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