What scares President Trump, and what makes him feel safe? The pursuit of safety was one of the central themes of his State of the Union speech, delivered before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night. Near the beginning of the address, after what has become an obligatory line of diagnosis—“The state of our union is strong, because our people are strong”—Trump added, more quickly, “And together we are building a safe, strong, and proud America.” What became only slightly clearer, over the next hour, was how those pieces—safety, strength, pride—relate to and rely on one another. What binds them together for Trump, it seems, is fear.

This fearfulness was noticeable, for example, when Trump spoke of immigration. Speaking of the visa-lottery system and what he called “chain migration”—that is, family reunification, one of the central plot elements in countless American stories—Trump said, “In the age of terrorism, these programs present risks we can just no longer afford.” Opponents of immigration have pushed similar lines in almost every American age—about anarchists, Bolsheviks, members of Asian or Italian secret societies or gangs. We have found ways, including creative and undaunted law enforcement, to confront whatever challenges new groups, coming from countries that may be full of dangers, may bring. All Americans—among them the parents, who were Trump’s guests at the speech, of two girls who were murdered on Long Island, allegedly by a group of MS-13 gang members who included undocumented immigrants—deserve that. But shutting down family reunification, which has also been a means by which rootless newcomers become rooted, hardly seems like the bravest, or most American, of answers. Or is the issue not that this is the age of terrorism but the age of immigration from a new set of countries—ones whose people may not look the way that Trump thinks Americans should look but, rather, appear frightening to him?

One of Trump’s oddest phrases in the speech came when he was laying out the “pillars” of his proposed immigration deal. After listing protections for Dreamers, border security, and an end to the visa lottery, he said, “The fourth and final pillar protects the nuclear family by ending chain migration.” How, one might ask, had family reunification ever hurt the nuclear family? Wasn’t the idea of reunification, indeed, about both America and immigrants valuing family? Not in Trump’s view: the definition of family was too broad, because it included “distant relatives” (only if you consider siblings and parents distant). If reunification were limited to spouses and children who are minors, Trump said, we would be able to “focus on the immediate family.” The threat to nuclear families, in other words, was brand erosion—a phenomenon that Trump might know about, considering how many buildings and marginal products he has put his name on over the years. But the idea of family does not need trademark protection; it is not something that needs to be hoarded, as if welcoming more members at the Thanksgiving table would turn the dinner into a down-market affair. (In a sense, Trump’s line echoes the argument that same-sex marriage was somehow a threat to the institution of marriage, rather than an affirmation of its everyday value.) Trump makes it sound as if, walking into any room, Americans ask the same question that might occur to him: Who are these people, and what do they want from me?

Similarly, at another point, Trump said, in a petulant tone, “Americans are dreamers, too,” as if anyone had been given reason to doubt that. As my colleague Jonathan Blitzer noted, this was a complaint about the Dreamers (who, the “too” suggested, were not Americans) and one of a peculiar kind. It wasn’t just the substance of the Dreamers’ aspirations—their hope for documentation, for a chance to work in the country they grew up in—that Trump seemed to resent but that they aspired at all. Dreaming was something Americans did; why did they think that they deserved to? More than that, he made it sound as though dreams could be intruded upon—as if it cheapened dreams if the wrong sort of people shared them. But dreams are not hotel suites. It is, perhaps, odd that a career peddler of mass fantasies like Trump could be so put off by what he presents as presumption, to the point where he regards it as a theft. This is, perhaps, where pride comes in. Trump, it seems, mistakes exclusivity and arrogance for strength. But they are not the same thing, not remotely.

The State of the Union might have cosseted his pride, with the Republicans in the audience bolstering him, and Melania smiling in the gallery, and the clapping, which he led, at times for his guests, who had shown real bravery—in the face of fires or hurricanes or ISIS, or the loss of or the adoption of a child—but often enough for himself. And yet there was an underlying note of insecurity. Perhaps both of those sentiments induced Trump to use the speech to announce an executive order that he “just signed, prior to walking in,” revoking President Barack Obama’s January, 2009, executive order directing that the detention center at Guantánamo Bay be closed. Since Obama didn’t manage to close the facility, the order was effectively already dead. But Trump’s order gave him a chance to do two things: mock his predecessor, and scorn the normal instruments of the American legal system. “Terrorists are not merely criminals. They are unlawful enemy combatants. And, when captured overseas, they should be treated like the terrorists they are,” he said.

The vagueness of Trump’s definitions there, of terrorist and criminal, and the tautology—terrorists should be treated like terrorists—should cause concern, given the past abuses and crimes in American detention practices in the war on terror. (What about American citizens arrested overseas and held extrajudicially? An A.C.L.U. case, involving an American held in Iraq, raises related questions and is working its way through the courts now.) It is the civilian justice system that has a far better record of actually convicting terrorists. Trump’s executive order also refers to prisoners against whom there is not enough evidence to bring proceedings, even in a military commission, but who, the order says, nonetheless “must” be held. On what basis, and on whose order? Trump has a way of presenting fear, and his preferred responses to it, as a necessity.

And then there were the games with the facts. In speaking about Guantánamo, Trump said, “In the past, we have foolishly released hundreds and hundreds of dangerous terrorists, only to meet them again on the battlefield, including the ISIS leader, al-Baghdadi, who we captured, who we had, who we released.” As PolitiFact noted, Trump was wrong about the number of former Guantánamo detainees even suspected of reëngaging in anti-American activities. And, although al-Baghdadi was in American custody, he was not at Guantánamo and was not “released” but, rather, was handed over to Iraqi forces, who later let him go, suggesting that the problem lies not with our adherence to the Constitution but elsewhere—perhaps with our choice of wars and the allies we choose to fight alongside.

Trump also had a line that might be open to some interpretation. “I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers—and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people,” he said. This probably refers, in part, to Trump’s interest in civil-service reform, or just in firing people responsible for the many problems at Veterans Affairs hospitals, which he mentioned elsewhere in the speech. But he is also a President who has fired his F.B.I. director, leading to more trouble, as he has made clear, than he feels he deserves. He has complained about getting less protection from the Attorney General, in that regard, than he believes he is owed. The day before the speech, it was reported that Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the F.B.I., was leaving earlier than expected, reportedly in response to pressure from Trump. And Trump had reportedly also ordered the firing of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, only to be dissuaded—for the moment, anyway. A demand for safety can turn into a call for extremism. And it can lead a President to dangerous places.