Trump’s statements say more about his disregard for the rule of law than they do about Clinton or her e-mail server. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID PAUL MORRIS / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY

Thursday night, at the San Jose Convention Center, Donald Trump offered a very Trumpian theory for why Hillary Clinton, a woman who served for four years as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, might be saying positive things about Obama's foreign-policy record, and in particular about the nuclear deal with Iran. "She doesn't want to go to jail! That's why folks, that's why," he told the crowd, suggesting that Obama was holding the threat of imprisonment over her. Indeed, that fear was the reason that she was working so hard to win her party's primaries. Trump had analyzed her race against Senator Bernie Sanders, and all the signs were there: "The only reason she's been dragged so far left, believe me, is that she doesn't want to go to jail over the e-mails”—that is, for undefined crimes related to her use of a private e-mail system while in the State Department. "If I win," Trump said, then spread his arms, shrugged, and muttered something about statutes of limitations and what he would tell his Attorney General to do. He would, he said, be "fair."

The idea that Presidents can use prosecutors to protect or attack their enemies, and that winning elections can make legal problems—fraud allegations, perhaps—go away may say more about why the job looks so good to Trump than it does about the e-mail story. It adds to the list of alarms about the disregard for the rule of law with which he might govern. It also says a great deal about the way that Trump is trying to win, and about how, if he loses, he would try to bring what's left of Americans' faith in our governing institutions down with him. "You know, folks, I used to say, ‘Leave it up to the courts,’ ” he said, of the e-mail case. No need for that now: he had looked into it himself. "Folks, honestly, she's guilty as hell," he said. And then he added a line that he has used, in one form or the other, for months: "The fact that they even allow her to participate in this race is a disgrace to the United States. It's a disgrace to our nation."

This has been the Trump drumbeat, whether as a throwaway line to reporters or to work up a crowd. At a rally on October 15th: “I mean, honestly, she shouldn’t be allowed to run." On March 1st, the morning after Super Tuesday, with Chris Christie standing next to him: "If she's allowed to run, I would be very, very surprised, but if she's allowed to run, honestly, it'll be a sad day for this country." Campaigning in Pennsylvania, in April: "If she even gets to run—I think she’s being protected." And the day before the San Jose speech, standing in front of his plane, at an airfield in Sacramento: "Honestly, she should not be allowed to run. It’s a disgrace, it’s a disgrace." (“Honestly" and "disgrace" are two of Trump's go-to words, though he often seems to have transposed their meanings.) In Sacramento, he added, "With that being said, I want to beat her. But she should not be allowed to run."

That is the Trump thesis, and not just about Hillary Clinton. His competitors shouldn't even be allowed in the game; it's outrageous that he has to deal with them at all. Part of this is a sore loser pre-manufacturing excuses. It has one effect on the public imagination when the issue is casino bankruptcy. It has a potentially more damaging one when Trump is manipulating suspicions that people have—and not without some basis—that the political system is "rigged" against them. Trump has a knack for channelling concerns about money and power into conspiratorial-minded nativist rage. (His theories also betray a befuddled sense of how American politics work: who are the “they” who allow people to run, or don’t?)

More than that, “she should not be allowed to run” is an attack on Clinton's legitimacy as a candidate. Similarly, birtherism, of which Trump was the braying champion, was an attack on Obama's legitimacy as a candidate, as a President, as an American—as a man worthy of respect. And now, according to Trump, the illegitimate President is extorting the illegitimate potential President: she has to help the Iranians or he’ll throw her in jail. In this scenario, Obama is a crypto-Islamist and Clinton is a criminal. (“Crooked Hillary.”) The racial bigotry, when Trump was pushing the birtherism case, was inescapable. It was echoed this week when he said that Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the judge in his Trump University case, had "an inherent conflict of interest" because he is "of Mexican heritage" and Trump wants to build a wall. Does that mean, if he is elected, that no Latino judges should be allowed to adjudicate—or only the ones who did what they were told? As Jeffrey Toobin has pointed out, Trump's legal philosophy is, in its essential form, based on who Trump believes is for Trump.

And Hillary Clinton? "Do you really believe that Hillary is Presidential? This is not Presidential material," he said in Sacramento. “Hillary is not a talented person. In fact, she is a person with absolutely no natural talent.” He went on a riff about her being sluggish and sleeping through phone calls, except for the ones that came in from "her slimy friends." In San Jose, he said, "She does not look Presidential." Perhaps, when he wondered aloud if anyone would vote for Carly Fiorina's "face," he meant less a face that wasn't attractive than one that was female.

Clinton has made plenty of bad moves with regard to her e-mail server. The pressure that is on her as a result cannot all be ascribed to her enemies, and if she ignores that she will only help them. It is, for example, unfathomable that she and her campaign allowed her decision not to coöperate fully with the State Department's Inspector General to come as a surprise to the public when his report was issued last month, in contradiction with the campaign’s public message. That was entirely within her team’s control. But, in terms of damage to the country, it is not the fevered conspiracy and political-protection racket of the Trump imagination. The e-mail story is a piece of information about her that voters get to consider. And then they are allowed to vote for her, whether Trump likes it or not.