As far as I’m concerned, those ugly scenes of last night’s siege in Chicago gave us the clearest picture yet of what American life under a President Donald J. Trump would look like. And it would not be “fantastic.”

It would look like George Wallace’s Alabama, Lester Maddox’s Georgia and, yes, eerily reminiscent of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago, circa 1968.

At one point CNN’s political elder, David Gergen, asked aghast and aloud: “Where is the candidate? Why isn’t Donald Trump seeking to denounce this? I think what we’re seeing in the Chicago street could really hurt him.”

Is that what you really think, David? Honestly? After seven months of listening to Trump massage the spleens of his superheated crowds by sneering, “I’d love to punch some of these protesters in the face.”

After all those years in the White House, jumping back and forth across the political divide, do you really think Donald Trump was going to step forward and open his big, angry mouth in an effort to calm things down? Are you kidding me?

Anger is all that Trump has been about since he first rode that golden eleva­tor into our political consciousness. Anger is the central ingredient of the stand-up routine that passes for a political campaign.

How about those weird, unsettling images this week of thousands of white Trumpians, raising their right hands at the request of their political leader, as a gesture of their allegiance?

Did you think The Donald might have lifted that trick from a former wallpaper-hanger who proved very skilled at whipping up the anger of the white mobs in Berlin of the 1930s.

I sat in the back seat of a Dublin cab this week and had the baffled driver ask me, “What is going on over there in the States? Are you serious with Trump?”

“What do people in Ireland think?” I asked.

“We think the man is daft. I can’t see where he would do anything but hurt America. I mean the stuff he’s been saying? Who talks like that?”

Thugs talk like that, I told my Irish cab driver. Specifically, a thug who has been able to market and “brand” his anger with the help of a national media apparatus that can’t seem to get enough of him.

Around 9 p.m. last night, Trump surfaced on the phone to tell CNN that he called off last night’s rally “because I didn’t want to see anyone get hurt.”

What a guy. He blamed the rumble on “the divided country we have.”

He denied that the malevo­lent drum he’s been beating at rallies all across the country played any role in last night’s mayhem. But then, what else would Trump say?

I’ll leave you with a question: Why does this ugliness follow Donald Trump, and no other candidate? Because he is one very ugly guy, that’s why.