Illustration by João Fazenda

What is there left to know about Donald Trump? Robert Mueller, various state officials, and a legion of reporters around the country are dedicated to penetrating any stubborn mysteries that still linger, yet who can argue that there is insufficient evidence to make a rational judgment about the character of the man, the nature of his Presidency, and the climate he has done so much to create and befoul?

Last week, with the midterm elections fast approaching, law-enforcement agents pored over an accumulating pile of crude explosive devices that had been sent to some of the President’s most prominent critics: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Eric Holder, Maxine Waters, George Soros, Robert De Niro, Tom Steyer, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and, at the CNN offices in New York, John Brennan and James Clapper. A tinfoil-hat brigade of reactionaries immediately insisted that the cunning “Democrat Party” had run a “false flag” plot designed to boost its chances on Election Day. On Friday, near Fort Lauderdale, F.B.I. officials arrested a suspect named Cesar Altieri Sayoc, a man in his mid-fifties with an extensive criminal record. Officials also seized the suspect’s van, which was plastered with pro-Trump stickers, as well as one that read “CNN Sucks” and another that had a picture of Hillary Clinton in the crosshairs of a gun.

Law enforcement will continue to investigate the incident in the days ahead. But what’s already clear is that it occurred at a moment of tragic division and conspiracy-mongering generated, foremost and daily, by the President of the United States. The right has no monopoly on insult and incivility—the online universe can be a sewer of spite—but there is no real equivalence: no modern President has adopted and weaponized such malevolent rhetoric as a lingua franca.

Trump is a masterful demagogue of the entertainment age. His instruments are resentment, sarcasm, unbounded insult, casual mendacity, and the swaggering assertion of dominance. From his desk in the Oval Office, on Twitter, and at political rallies across the country, he spews poison into the atmosphere. Trump is an agent of climate change, an unceasing generator of toxic gas that raises the national temperature.

No one suggests that he is a perpetrator, but pipe bombs as a tool of political intimidation do not arrive unexpectedly. They come after the President’s remarks on “birtherism,” Mexican “rapists,” and Charlottesville; after “enemy of the people” and “Lock Her Up!” They come after he has mocked the disabled and victims of sexual violence, after he has praised many of the world’s autocrats and diminished democratic allies. Violence, for him, is a source of titillation. Recently, Trump rallied Montana Republicans by extolling their incumbent congressman, Greg Gianforte—“He’s my guy”—not because Gianforte had devised a piece of legislation for the common good but because he had body-slammed a reporter to the ground. “This is actually exactly why my father won,” Eric Trump said recently on Fox News. He is “un-P.C.,” not a “perfectly scripted politician.”

To be unscripted implies a kind of joyful spontaneity, but Trump’s ramblings always come laced with a thread of malice. His outrages are not mistakes; they are deliberate and a matter of pride. (“I know words. I have the best words.”) Speaking in the Oval Office last week, he riffed weirdly, yet furiously, about the great “caravan” of migrants—potential terrorists!—surging ever closer toward the American frontier. “Over the course of the year, over the course of a number of years, they’ve intercepted many people from the Middle East, they’ve intercepted ISIS, they’ve intercepted all sorts of people, they’ve intercepted good ones and bad ones, they’ve intercepted wonderful people from the Middle East and they’ve intercepted bad ones. They’ve intercepted wonderful people from South America and from other parts further south.”

At a rally in Wisconsin, on Wednesday, the President reacted to the news of the multiple bombs with a barely perfunctory call for a “civil tone.” Of course, he didn’t mean it, not remotely. He made it plain that civility is for suckers, a joke. “By the way, do you see how nice I’m behaving tonight?” he said, with a smirk. “Have you ever seen this? We’re all behaving very well.” The next morning, in a characteristically brazen tweet, Trump amped up the toxicity. A bomb had been sent to a media outlet. The fault was the media’s. “A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News,” he wrote. “Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!” At 3 A.M. on Friday, he tweeted his fury at CNN.

When the leaders of the Republican Party first acquainted themselves with Trump’s rhetoric and character a few years ago, many of them were appalled. Ted Cruz, after hearing Trump insult his wife’s appearance and insinuate that his father bore some responsibility for the assassination of John F. Kennedy, called his rival a “pathological liar,” a “snivelling coward.” But, after Cruz became one more casualty of the 2016 Republican primaries, and reckoned that he could not hold his Senate seat while attacking Trump, he, like almost every other light of the “party of Lincoln,” capitulated. The G.O.P. is now Ted Cruz writ large, a political party that has debased itself in the image of its standard-bearer.

The midterm elections are being held in an atmosphere of immense national stress. It could only be so when the singular actor in the drama is Donald Trump, who thrives on the idea that American life is a daily cliffhanger, in which the hero bravely sets out to deepen the divide between his supporters and everyone else, to dismantle international agreements and alliances, and to protect corporate interests over the interests of working people and the natural world. There are, unquestionably, countless local and regional issues being debated, but, above all, this election is a referendum on Trump, a contest between his base and those who feel that it is in the national interest to establish at least some brake—a new majority in the House of Representatives, a new crop of governors and state legislators—to slow his disintegration of American life and his despoilment of the national spirit. Two years ago, the prospect of a Trump Presidency represented an emergency. Tens of millions of voters found a reason to stay home. This year, the polls are tight. The stakes cannot be overstated. ♦