It took Donald Trump to make me associate Franklin Roosevelt with Pennywise the Dancing Clown.

It was Roosevelt, of course, who, in his first inaugural address, said that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That remarkable speech, delivered before Congress on March 4, 1933, is worth revisiting, and not least for the dignity of its rhetoric. The speech outlined the strategy with which Roosevelt would combat the Great Depression; its hope was to inspire, to bring people together and above all, to reassure the nation that we would “revive and prosper.”

The primary obstacle to this restoration was not economics but fear: “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” A key strategy for conquering that fear, he went on, is speaking with candor: “This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.”

If, 85 years later, you wanted to imagine the presidency of Mr. Trump in a nutshell, simply take all of the generousness and wisdom in Roosevelt’s first inaugural address and do the opposite.

The only thing Mr. Trump has is fear itself.

He wants us to be afraid, for it is fear that divides us, that sets us one against the other. If there is anything frank and bold about this presidency, it is Mr. Trump’s ability to invent falsehoods out of fairy dust and marzipan, solely to make us afraid — of immigrants, of transgender people, of one another.