IN writing this, I feel rather like a time traveller. I’m wearing my fleecy dressing gown, and by my side is the ubiquitous cold cup of tea which I always make but then forget about – it’s a calm and easy Friday morning. The dog is snoring on his brown tartan cushion and I’m already thinking ahead to lunch. Yes, it’s a peaceful world.

But in your world, in the time when you’re reading this, it’s Saturday. And if it’s Saturday then that means the inauguration has occurred and Trump has finally got the keys.

I want to send you best wishes from Friday morning. I’m waving! It’s really nice here. The terrible moment hasn’t happened yet. But time has leapt forward and somehow it’s Saturday where you are and now he’s in charge. It’s been said a million times so I won’t go over it again, but it’s genuinely frightening that such an ill-tempered, grudge-bearing, impulsive man has America’s nuclear codes.

Yet it’s hard to remain in a state of anxiety and fear. The body and the mind can’t endure it for too long. That’s why a person feels weak and floppy when a panic attack subsides, or how you can easily slip off to sleep after having had a good cry. After the swell of all that emotion comes a little spell of serenity.

Maybe it will be that way with Trump? After all the protesting, hacking, name-calling, embarrassments, accusations and ugliness maybe he’ll just trot humbly into the White House and quietly get to work. Maybe he won’t blow us all up? Maybe.

I had some room to be hopeful after watching Meet The Trumps: From Immigrant to President (C4, Tuesday).

It was a colourful documentary telling the story of the Trump family tree and it started with The Donald’s grandfather, Friedrich, a German immigrant who made his money during the Gold Rush in Washington state.

The typical success story of a 19th century immigrant to America is that they sought their fortune in starting up small business which reflected their heritage: an Italian ice-cream shop or pizzeria, for example. But not Grandaddy Trump. There were to be no cute Germanic shops for him. Instead he made money by “flogging a dead horse”, picking up the dead horses which lay by the roadside and carving them up for meat for the hungry adventurers.

This seemed so absurd, so other-worldly, like something belonging to a grubby old spaghetti Western, that the viewer was able to enjoy it as a rags-to-riches story and perhaps forget that this dead-horse-chopper was a Trump. The story moved on to Fred, Donald’s dad, who took over the family businesses at 12 years old when his father died suddenly.

Under Fred, the family moved away from carcasses and into real estate. I suppose it smells nicer and you can’t very well position yourself as a vigorous young go-getter in glitzy Manhattan if your business is dead nags. Fred began building cheap apartments for workers and veterans, doing so with massive grants from Eisenhower’s government. There was a post-war housing shortage and generous assistance was available to those who could throw up homes cheaply and quickly. Fred was in line for these handouts and got fabulously rich with a very simple scheme: ask the government for more cash than is needed.

Build the houses, pocket the rest. Easy money! Fred was soon called before a committee to explain, and the excuse that the cash was “just resting in his account”, was hardly convincing.

Cheating the taxpayer must be exhausting because Fred soon began to let his second son, Donald, take over the business. Naturally, he’d asked his first son to do it, but this man had crazy ideas like fitting safe, new windows into the apartments. What a nut, right? Sad!!! So he went off to become a pilot, then a worn-out caretaker in his father’s flats, then an alcoholic, before dying in his early 40s.

Again, this was such a rollicking story – a new money, New York Dynasty – so it was easy to forget the serious undertones, and that the point of all this sordid drama was to show us how the incoming president was formed. When Donald was placed in charge of the business (and I can imagine him whining, sulking and tugging at Fred Trump’s coat-tails (Daddy, daddy let me do it!) his first big challenge was a court case alleging his housing developments would not rent to black or Hispanic tenants. In his typically unguarded way of speaking, he goaded the prosecuting lawyer by asking her to admit she didn’t want to live beside black people either. Here the story stopped being a terrifically gaudy soap opera and became troubling, especially when we saw clips of Trump going on about genetics.

Desperate to share his thoughts on genes with America’s hairsprayed 1980s interviewers, he talked of how your character is determined, not by nurture or experience, but by how superior your parents were. The rich and successful should mate and breed races of super-children. The rest are losers. Sad!!!

And yet I felt a tiny flicker of hope watching this story of the monstrous, grasping family.

In the various interviews we saw, all filmed several years ago when Donald Trump was famous merely for building stuff and marrying immigrants, he seemed softer and more polite. He didn’t shout over anyone and neither did he pace around the room, growling over the interviewers’ shoulders as he did in the debates with Hillary Clinton.

He seemed, dare I say it, nicer?

This offers hope because it implies his current abrasive, rude, resentful personality might just be an exaggeration. Perhaps he’s cranked it up several levels as he perceives – and rightly, it would seem – that an ugly, crude, furious persona is needed to win the presidency. We’re in an era of anger and maybe, like a salesman, he’s pitching to meet the buyers’ mood. And so now that he’s won, maybe – oh just maybe – he’ll soften slightly?