For all the depressing, terrible and tragic news of the past 24 hours, the most worrying was an opinion poll.

The death and destruction here and abroad upturned the world for multiple thousands of families.

The opinion poll threatens to upturn the world for everyone, with subsequent suffering for many millions.

The New York Times’ Siena College polls found Donald Trump ahead of Joe Biden in five of the six battleground states likely to decide next year’s presidential election.

Never mind the multiple civil and criminal cases, the co-conspirators pleading guilty and Trump’s lies becoming ever more outlandish, right now he’s in front to win the election to be held this time next year.

The seemingly ridiculous idea of Trump being elected president while in jail and then pardoning himself remains ridiculous to sane Australians, but it’s also very real.

That latest poll results coincided with another NYT report that Trump allies are preparing to stack a new administration with “a more aggressive breed of right-wing lawyer, dispensing with traditional conservatives who they believe stymied his agenda in his first term”.

It seems the conservative Federalist Society legal network that helped stack judicial appointments last time round is now considered actually too conservative for what should be more accurately described as a radical far-right Trump party:

“Top Trump allies have come to view their party’s legal elites — even leaders with seemingly impeccable conservative credentials — as out of step with their movement.

“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell T. Vought, a former senior Trump administration official who runs a think tank with close ties to the former president. He argued that many elite conservative lawyers had proved to be too timid when, in his view, the survival of the nation is at stake.

“Such comments may surprise those who view the Federalist Society as hard-line conservatives. But the move away from the group reflects the continuing evolution of the Republican Party in the Trump era and an effort among those now in his inner circle to prepare to take control of the government in a way unseen in modern presidential history.”

Joe Biden could lose the 2024 election to Donald Trump, latest polling shows. Photo: AAP

The Times reports the Trump supporters want lawyers in federal agencies and in the White House willing to use theories that more establishment lawyers would reject.

“This new mindset matches Mr Trump’s declaration that he is waging a ‘final battle’ against demonic ‘enemies’ populating a ‘deep state’ within the government that is bent on destroying America.”

The second-in-line to the US presidency already is someone who is a rabid Trump supporter, doesn’t believe in evolution and has suggested teaching evolution played a role in school mass murders.

If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were to both be “incapacitated”, the House Speaker – hardcore Louisiana Christian nationalist Mike Johnson – would become acting president.

One result of such fundamentalist Christianity is climate change denialism. Mike Johnson’s faith, like Tony Abbott’s Pellsian Catholicism, backs fossil fuels over science.

America turning its back on its baby-steps carbon policy would end whatever hopes remain of co-ordinated international policy to limit global warming to merely disastrous.

Should Donald Trump win next year, the administration would be stacked with Mike Johnsons and worse – unprincipled opportunists pursuing their own benefits, doing whatever Trump’s whims and fancies might indicate.

Maintaining “status quo” stability is the alleged justification for Australia surrendering its sovereignty, becoming an American military base, signing up to America’s doctrine of containing China and spending many hundreds of billions of dollars to develop a defence force to perform as part of the American military.

A febrile Trump America is inherently unstable, its foreign policy based on however much foreign leaders appeal to Mr Trump’s infamous vanity.

The old idea has been that there was enough depth in American institutions to weather a ratbag presidency.

Team Trump looks determined to clean out that “depth”, replacing it with a dangerous mix of chancers, extreme ideologues, cultists, and the pig ignorant. (Apologies to pigs.)

The threat in the NYT opinion poll findings should be enough to have Australia pursuing independent foreign and defence policies, working to assert ourselves as something more than America’s Deputy Dawg.

But no. Whether Labor or Coalition, Australia remains married to America’s policy priorities – until death and destruction do us part.