This kind of subtlety is not of much use in politics, if we assume politics to be primarily about achieving power. A leader who recognizes nuance may be nice, but a nuanced campaigner is a bad campaigner; a nuanced speaker risks being misunderstood; nuanced proposals sound a lot like compromise. A politician steeped in nuance may appear not smart but spineless; a politician who avoids it may seem not simple-minded but determined.

“Leadership cannot thrive on nuance or uncertainty,” wrote the legal scholar Richard A. Epstein in The Washington Post in 2011, praising Ronald Reagan’s “unshakable commitments.” Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, was “a man for whom shades of gray and nuances were annoying,” the military historian Rick Atkinson told PBS in 1996. For the next president, subtlety was a problem: “The nuances and complexities of the middle ground Clinton seeks are sometimes difficult to convey in a highly charged campaign,” wrote Marshall Ingwerson in The Christian Science Monitor in 1992. (Linguistic shading of a different sort would haunt his legacy.) George W. Bush abandoned that burden, reportedly proclaiming that “I don’t do nuance.” Barack Obama’s instinct to shade and equivocate was easy for opponents to mock as weakness or aloofness; it could frustrate supporters too.

Then came Donald J. Trump. To the extent that nuance is a virtue, he is one of the least virtuous figures in modern history, but to the extent that it is a burden, he is utterly liberated. To say that he does not appreciate the nuances of problems is to say nothing at all; “nuance” is not a useful spectrum on which to evaluate him, or populist politics in general. And so, disorientingly, it is currently critics of the president who are accused of lacking nuance or not recognizing it where it exists. They erupt when Trump, in a conversation about immigration but also criminal gangs, uses the word “animals,” and are met with sighs about their failure to acknowledge “the specific context of these particular remarks,” as Cathy Young put it in a Newsday column: “That’s not excessive nuance; it’s factual reporting.” The Resistance style of politics — an inverted personality cult, animated by the singular unfitness of one politician — is an easy target for such criticism, give that it is an agitated response to a perceived emergency, a taking up of rhetorical arms. But there is a hint of vengefulness in this effort to turn “nuance” against the people who once lauded it, in the long shadow of perhaps the least subtle man alive.

Today the loudest calls for nuance are coming from the opposition to the opposition: people united less by a coherent politics than a belief that the politics of others — not those actually in power, but the aggrieved “mob” questioning that power — have gone too far. It is a pet concern of publications like The Federalist and National Review, and, though less so than before the election, of certain “Never Trump” conservative pundits. In an April column in The Wall Street Journal, William McGurn, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, rattled off a litany of supposed overreactions, suggesting a “willingness of those who know better” to go along with them, as long as Trump is the target. “The same people who accuse Mr. Trump of lacking depth and nuance,” he wrote, “toss off allusions to Hitler, Stalin and a parade of murderous dictators.” Such unsubtlety, critics say, prevents valid criticisms from being taken seriously, or it poisons our common discourse, or it alienates opponents and is Why Trump Won. (No topic has inspired more demands for nuance than “the Trump voter.”) This allegiance to nuance may be genuine, and the broad claim of its value — that politics is complicated, and everyone must face this reality — is at least engageable. But it is a curious choice to finally stand up for political subtlety, and for not painting with a broad brush, with your back turned to Donald J. Trump.