But President Trump wants to divide the country between the white Americans he prizes and their purported foes, who may lurk around any corner unless he and Congress carry out the policies he described last night: the most extreme crackdown on immigration since 1924, an expansion of our nuclear arms program, the removal of federal employees who “undermine the public trust or fail the American people” and the continued operation of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, which as of December 2017 held 41 people who are subject to indefinite detention in violation of due process.

This agenda is simply fear as national policy. What else explains Mr. Trump’s talk about North Korea and nuclear weapons? Purging federal employees, while it may satisfy the president’s need to punish his enemies, would mean, given his hiring record, that there would be fewer people in place to uphold our laws and carry out policies that help millions of Americans. The historic lows in African-American and Latino unemployment that he mentioned last night are partly a direct result of the productivity of hundreds of thousands of workers he wishes to deport.

President Trump made tokens of his minority guests, which underscored the point that he doesn’t quite consider nonwhite people to be on a par with white Americans. Corey Adams, a black welder, was brought out as cover for the tax cut his employers at Staub Manufacturing Solutions in Dayton, Ohio, received under the Republicans’ tax plan. Mr. Adams was in fact a reminder that working-class black people could reap minuscule benefits from tax cuts that will largely make the rich richer. But that’s not all: President Trump also needed to tell us that Mr. Adams was an “all-American worker” to assure his xenophobic base that Mr. Adams couldn’t possibly hail from somewhere else.

President Trump also introduced us to Celestino Martinez, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who led an operation on Long Island to track down gang members, including members of MS-13. Mr. Trump introduced Mr. Martinez right after saying, “Americans are dreamers, too,” to insult recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and illustrate that his American dream, instead of meaning the freedom to seek refuge on our shores and work toward a satisfying future, is based on arresting gang members. To make a Latino the face of ICE is a wink to Mr. Trump’s base. It also says that Latinos can be trusted to follow the Trump agenda and throw people who look like them out of the country if they need to.