Last week, I did a reading for my new book at a local bookstore. After finishing the program, we opened it up to the audience. The first question came from an older white gentleman who rose from his seat in the back and marched to the front of the room.

He had a piece of paper in his hand, which he brandished for the rest of the crowd. On it was a photocopy of a Facebook post in which I had praised Hillary Clinton as “the president of my heart."

The man, by now trembling with rage, began to cite a litany of what he considered to be Clinton’s sins (her support for the Iraq War, her role in the invasion of Libya, etc.) “How black is your heart?” he growled at me.

He turned and stomped back to his seat before I could answer, muttering, “And that’s why I voted for Trump!”

The rest of the audience was stunned by the man’s palpable contempt.

So was I. I tried to be deferential in answering his “question.” But what struck me as odd, in retrospect, was that this man was still obsessing over his hatred of Clinton, nearly two years after she lost the election. He had nothing positive to say about the man he’d voted for, only wrath for the woman who ran against him.

I thought about this guy as I watched a video clip of Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaking to a group of young conservatives on Tuesday. The high schoolers spontaneously start chanting “Lock her up” and Sessions — our nation’s top law enforcement official — repeats their words and chuckles fondly.

As you may remember, “Lock her up” was the central rallying cry at the Republican National Convention. Forget policy proposals aimed at helping working Americans, or hopeful slogans. Instead, the most salient message from one of our two major political parties was simply that the opposing candidate should be imprisoned.

At the time, I figured this chant was a way of unifying the party behind a divisive candidate, one who barely understood the precepts of traditional conservatism and who had few real policy positions.