Judges are supposed to be restrained, decorous. But the diminutive, 83-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg​, a justice of the US Supreme Court, has gone off the reservation, denouncing Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump as "a faker [with] an ego".

It's the job of historians to judge presidencies with hindsight. But this go-round they can't wait – David McCullough, the doyen of American historians, is casting judgment on the mere prospect.

In a Facebook video, McCullough declares: "When you think of how far we have come, and at what cost, and with what faith, to just turn it all over to this monstrous clown with a monstrous ego, with no experience, never served his country in any way – it's just crazy."

Political professionals cringe – some liken attending the Republican convention in Cleveland next week to having root canal surgery; others to jury duty.

"Would rather attend the public hanging of a good friend," says Republican digital strategist Will Ritter. "This ship can sink without me," says another.

An editorial in The Washington Post condemns what it describes as the "repulsive slobbering" of "me, me, me" groupies who want to be picked as Trump's running mate.

And accusing the GOP of having failed conservatives, Iowa talk show host Steve Deace​ laments: "Conservatism's role in the 2016 election is now over, while the idiocracy takes it from here."

Next week, we all go to Cleveland – for what?

The GOP – the Grand Old Party – is on the verge of anointing as its presidential candidate a man whose autocratic instincts move him to praise dictators and tyrants, who has no respect for the First Amendment, is a practiced liar, a misogynist, a religious bigot, a racist and an anti-Semite.

Some say he's a buffoon, others a demagogue.

He's winning endorsements from the Ku Klux Klan and the white supremacists that have been on the rise since an African-American was elected president in 2008. A Republican Party colleague likens Trump to Mussolini and Hitler; another describes him as "the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency". A candidate described in New Republic as an "obscene figure", Trump boasts about the size of his manhood – and the use to which he has put it. And he seems to revel in the revulsion he causes in the party's establishment.

This promises to be a convention like no other. Trump says he wants showbiz – nightly features are expected to include presentations on the horror of the Benghazi attack on US personnel and the sex life of former president Bill Clinton.

The speakers' line-up is something of an embarrassment. The week after next, the Democratic convention in Philadelphia will feature a sitting President and his Vice-President, the first lady, a former president and an army of big political and celebrity names.

What's Trump got?

"It'll be like a hostage video of people forced on stage," says Republican strategist Rick Wilson. Apparently every member of the Trump family will speak, but the two living former Republican presidents are giving the convention a pass, as are the last two GOP presidential nominees and a swag of other big Republican names that would add political and social froth to a convention.

Astronaut Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a space shuttle mission, is scheduled to talk – which could heighten any sense that the convention is off the planet.

And perhaps the biggest political name on the list is former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani – yawn.

In completing the surrender of the party to Trump, the GOP platform is being finalised in the days before the convention – a document that looks like being even more right-wing than Trump's populist swag of policies and the platform on which the 2012 convention signed off.

Turning back the clock, the 2016 draft deems coal to be "clean" energy and bars women from military combat. It adopts a strict traditional view of the family and child rearing. It demands that members of Congress use religion as a guide to legislation and that the same-sex marriage decision of the Supreme Court be overturned by constitutional amendment.

The draft also contains Trump's language in opposing global trade pacts and embraces his plan for a wall to be built on the US border with Mexico.

There's still talk of forcing a formal vote on the Trump nomination, more in the hope of at least embarrassing him and the party, as opposed to robbing him of the nomination which won the support of more than 13 million primary voters.

The convention unfolds amidst tight security. Thousands of protesters are expected to descend on Cleveland and, in the wake of massacres in Orlando and Dallas and an apparent terrorist attack in France, holding cells for 1000 prisoners have been identified; courts are to be open for 20 hours a day and judges are rostered to work 10-hour shifts.

But all is not gloom and doom – an art installation called Everything She Says Means Everything is working to have 100 naked women outside the convention centre and a bus filled with 21 nuns is on its way to town to serve lemonade to the protesters.

They said Trump couldn't win the primaries – he did, causing 16 grown men and women to curl up and die politically in the face of his insults and harangues. This convention is the next hurdle – most expect the candidate's insatiable ego to go rogue and botch it – but maybe it won't.

And then there'll be the grinding campaign through to November – during which anything can happen.

If Trump tanks, the ticket tanks – only a tiny handful of Americans depart from the order of the party ticket when they cast their vote. And already there's intense speculation on how the party might recover – and reconcile with Republican voters who understand that they have been conned by a party establishment that thought them to be ideologically committed.

But their support for Trump shows that's not the case – they were just self-interested.

They are against trade deals and migration because they see their jobs disappearing. They don't support cuts to Social Security and Medicare, because those are their retirement safety nets. And they like his isolationist thinking because they don't want their kids dying in foreign wars – like the 5000-plus who died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But an important aspect of this chaotic moment is little acknowledged. Virtually all the campaign analysis and commentary resonates within the envelope of an American political process as it has played out down the years – two parties; one winner, one loser; get over it!

It's the same in Britain – a different political process, true; but similar outcomes were manifest before we knew what Brexit meant.

Go back to the unlikely appointment of Jeremy Corbyn​ as leader of the opposition UK Labour Party in 2015. He was installed as parliamentary leader by Labour's rank and file and union votes, but from the get-go his relationship with his parliamentary colleagues was toxic.

Something similar just happened with the British Tory Party.

In the House of Commons both sides opposed quitting the European Union, but Conservative Brexiteers Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom​ appealed over the heads of their politician colleagues to an anti-EU constituency that was a very different slice of British society to that which traditionally votes Conservative. They won, but on marching back into the Commons to claim the Tory leadership they were rebuffed. "Sorry, but no – we'd prefer one of us," they were told.

Donald Trump's campaign for president is the same game – and because the electoral college which appoints the US president is based on the popular vote in each state, Trump does get to ask the people.

Brexit was a fantastic go-round in which fringe dwellers in the political process – think Nigel Farage​ and his UK Independence Party – could circumvent conventional political process and campaign in the same base manner as Trump does, to pull off an unlikely victory with the support of separate chunks of the Tory and Labour constituencies.

In the jargon of our time, they cut out the middlemen. They revealed parties that had been cornerstones of the political process to be hollowed-out and of less lasting value than ascribed to them by conventional wisdom – the Tories continue to govern, but must implement a Brexit policy with which they don't agree; Labour MPs are trying to dump Corbyn, gutting the party's power to project itself as a useful entity and rendering its policies meaningless.

A process is unfolding – and it needs a name.

Think of the disruptive force of Uber and the taxi industry. In politics too, it's all about cutting out the middleman and allowing a consumer/voter to get to a guy/politician who will pick him up – or in the case of the Brexiteers and/or Trump, to respond to long-held grievances that for years have been fobbed off by parties that have claimed voter loyalty, but at the same time stuck to agendas that served the interests of their donors.

Actually, a name has been borrowed from economic research on the impact of new technology and its elimination of middlemen – as in the disappearance of record and video stores with the advent of online streaming of music and films.

It's called "disintermediation". Perhaps an early iteration was Barack Obama's 2008 campaign – he was the Uber candidate with his internet-driven micro-donations and data analytics that built a winning coalition vote by vote, abandoning the traditional reliance on television advertising and treating the nation like a local council ward – in which the issues and interests of voters were addressed on an individual basis.

That Trump is a Republican candidate is of little moment – he treats GOP orthodoxy with contempt and he might just as easily have been a Democratic candidate, in the same way that the blow-in Bernie Sanders was.

Larry Martinez, a political scientist at California State University, explains what's going down – the internet has made it much cheaper to raise funds and to get a message to voters "in essence, disintermediating the role of the political parties".

As he sets it out, elected members of Congress are being disintermediated by lobbyists in what he describes as a "political-industrial complex", a rigged game in which the commercial interests of lobbyists, on whom members of Congress depend for funds, effectively trump the traditional role of the political parties – leading to the rising disgust of voters, who feel left out.

"[They're] now identified as Joe and Jane Sixpack, the white working class which has seen dramatic declines of income and societal status. This is precisely the demographic that most strongly supports Trump," Martinez writes.

"Without labour union support, working class whites are threatened both by immigrants who compete most directly for those same low-skilled jobs and the rising economic clout of African-Americans who previously were excluded from the business mainstream by discriminatory laws and practices."

Chancing upon the political stage at a point where, since 2007, there has been a doubling of Republican support "for new ideas, a different approach, a candidate with no Washington experience", Trump responds to that frustration which, Martinez argues, is intensified by feelings in the white working class that without money, they are excluded from this newly commercialised political-industrial complex of congressmen and lobbyists.

Boston University social scientist Tom Whalen sees chaos ahead: "[Trump may] be delivering the death blow to the American political party system – he's certainly rewriting the playbook."

All this is why the Trump campaign is mesmerising – is it a slow-motion train wreck or the creation of a whole new approach to managing national affairs in which political parties might become irrelevant?

We hold our breath – will Trump get the much-talked-of "bounce" he needs in the polls coming out of the convention?

In the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Trump has never been in the lead.

But at four points in the last year he has come to within a hair's breadth of Clinton, most recently in mid-May. And this week, in the aftermath of the FBI's damning report on Clinton's email server, her support had dropped to the extent that Trump is back within the margin of error in most polls – just three points behind her.

On average, Democratic nominees get a post-convention polls bounce of about 6 per cent; Republicans, about 5 per cent.

Can Trump unify the party? Or is that question now out of date, irrelevant in a new political world? He has spent much of his campaign picking fights with the GOP establishment and while many of them have sworn off helping to make him shine at the convention, he hasn't asked too many of them to pitch in.

But in these parallel universes, where the Uber driver Trump competes against traditional Republican taxis, the election dynamic still comes down to a candidate winning the hearts and minds of a handful of independent or swing voters in a handful of electorates.

There is little indication that Trump's campaign understands that. But despite the intense Republican and other criticism of how he goes about his business, a raft of recent polls in swing states show Trump leading Clinton in Florida, Pennsylvania and Iowa; and they are tied in Ohio.

And what animates Trump and his supporters in a circular campaign motion is a sentiment like that expressed by a Trump supporter who told The New York Times early in the primary contests: "We know who Donald Trump is and we're going to use Donald Trump to either take over the GOP or blow it up."

So if the political Uber Trump gets a new car called a White House, how does he do the business? Trump is the Republican nominee because voters are so disenchanted with congressional gridlock. But what's the art of the deal with a House and Senate filled with taxi drivers who are resistant to change?