If the thought of Donald Trump has been lodged in your head of late, exclusively as a Republican presidential candidate, defamer of immigrants and thrice-wed champion of traditional marriage, then it may have escaped your attention that a lush and extravagant municipal golf course bearing his name — Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point — opened this spring on the southeastern shoreline of the Bronx. Paid for by New York City, to the sum of $127 million, and maintained by the Trump organization, the course offers the kind of visual lessons in inequality that make statistics and editorials and Thomas Piketty seem ponderously inefficient.

The view from the hilly course, designed by Jack Nicklaus, accommodates the entirety of the Manhattan skyline across the East River; from one vantage point, all you see is 432 Park Avenue protruding from billionaire’s row. A stretch of housing projects borders the links and so does a tightly packed cemetery, St. Raymond’s, near the Whitestone Bridge, a reminder that in New York death really is an extension of life — so much noise and not enough room.

For years, the notion that a luxury golf course would be built in the city’s most impoverished borough struck many as the equivalent of handing a camisole to a person with frostbite. The justification had been not simply that the enterprise would constitute a means of job creation for Bronx residents — which indeed it has — but also that the course would be so challenging in its play and so indistinguishable from a country club in its sensibility that it would attract major championship competition and in turn millions of dollars in revenue for the city.

But how likely is it now that the United States Open, so dependent on corporate sponsorships, will be scheduled on a public course named for someone who said he is committed to building a wall at the Mexican border to keep out drug dealers and “rapists”? Although you could argue that none of his comments could have been anticipated, getting blindsided by craziness from Mr. Trump is like landing at a monastery only to be surprised that it’s quiet.