Of all the words that Donald J. Trump flings into the world, the four most Trumpian are “We have no choice.” It’s a favorite phrase, and one that he used last week in response to the attack at Pulse, a gay dance club in Orlando, where Omar Mateen shot and killed forty-nine people and wounded fifty-three more. Mateen was an American, born in New York to Afghan parents. Yet Trump said the lesson of Orlando is that “we have no choice” but to institute a temporary ban that would prevent non-citizen Muslims from entering the United States. He said the same thing when he first called for the ban, last December, after the San Bernardino shooting. That time, he chanted it in triplicate—“We have no choice! We have no choice! We have no choice!”—as if it were a spell that would make him Presidential, or make his listeners forget that he is not.

Trump has invoked choicelessness to explain everything from why he will build a wall on the border with Mexico to why he talked about his anatomy during a Republican primary debate. The phrase is a dismissal of rational discussion and an intimation of the doom that awaits if Trump is not heeded. In his recent book, “Crippled America,” he said of his decision to run for the White House, “I had no choice. I see what’s happening to our country; it’s going to hell.”

Orlando was the first major domestic-terrorism crisis since Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee. His first response was to brag about “the congrats” he’d been receiving for having been “right on radical Islam.” Over the next few days, he suggested that President Obama had willfully failed to stop the shooting, for mysterious and possibly sinister reasons (“There’s something going on”), and accused American Muslims as a group of being similarly delinquent. He said, “They’re not reporting people, and they have to do that,” and insisted that America is “not going to continue to survive like this.”

He apparently meant that America cannot endure as a nation of immigrants, or as one that respects the rights of immigrants or even those of their American-born children. “What’s going to happen in fifteen and twenty years?” he asked Bill O’Reilly, on Fox News. “A lot of times, the children of people that come into the country become a big problem.” The same day, at the White House, after reviewing the state of the campaign against isis, President Obama warned about responses to Orlando from “politicians who tweet.” “Are we going to start treating all Muslim Americans differently?” he asked. That would be a betrayal of what American forces were fighting to protect, “and then the terrorists would have won. And we cannot let that happen.” The President added, “I will not let that happen.”

Reflecting on the rebuke at a rally a few hours later, Trump decided that Obama “was more angry at me than he was at the shooter.” Then he spoke again about the danger that the children of immigrants posed, which, he said, was made worse by political correctness. By mid-week, at an event in Atlanta, where Trump was introduced as “the man who is going to save America,” he had managed to formulate an idea of foreignness that was indifferent to citizenship. Mateen may have been born in America, but his parents weren’t, Trump said. “And his ideas weren’t born here. His ideas were born from someplace else.” The wrong ideas, in other words, as much as the wrong parents, could get a person disqualified as an American.

Trump arrived at that conclusion even as stories from Orlando were reminding others of the broad embrace that this country can offer. One of the oldest people killed in the attack was Brenda Lee Marquez McCool, born forty-nine years ago, in Brooklyn. She had gone to the club’s Latin Saturdays night to dance with her son, whom she shielded from the bullets, and who lived. One of the youngest was nineteen-year-old Jason Benjamin Josaphat, who had recently started college, and called his mother moments before he died.

If there is a group eager to explain that it has no choice, it is the leaders of the Republican Party. As Trump railed against Muslims, a few in the G.O.P. murmured that they wished he wouldn’t be so divisive. Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, said at a press conference that a religious test like the Muslim ban would not be “reflective” of the Party’s values; he preferred a “security test.” On that point, he and Trump, whom he has endorsed, would “agree to disagree.” Ryan certainly did not believe that helping Hillary Clinton win was an option. Senator John McCain said that Obama was “directly responsible” for the Orlando attack; he later explained that he meant that Obama’s policies were responsible, not that the President had been conspiring “personally” with the gunman. (The need to make that distinction shows how florid some of the charges against Obama have been.) McCain once accused Trump of having “fired up the crazies,” after which Trump insulted his war record. But McCain endorsed him; he seems to think that he had to if he wants to win reëlection.

The idea that there is no choice has always been an alibi for those who in some sense have given up on democracy—whether to justify a decision to declare a state of emergency or to just stay home from the polls—or on the rule of law. Perhaps not incidentally, Trump, despite his narrow view of this nation’s prospects, seems to imagine his own potential scope of action as almost limitless. If he is in the White House, trade deals will be easy. Winning will be routine. Reporters he doesn’t like will be denied press credentials, as the Washington Post learned last week. National security will be insured by his wall and by law-enforcement agents watching mosques.

“We have no choice” is the definitive Donald Trump phrase in another way: it is almost never true. Republicans are not bound never to vote for the candidate of another party, however unprincipled their own might be. Speakers of the House can resign. Senators can decide that they would rather lose an election. For that matter, any senator could have joined Chris Murphy’s fifteen-hour filibuster last week to force a vote on modest gun-control measures; only one Republican, Pat Toomey, of Pennsylvania, did. That was a choice, too. ♦