“I am your voice!” Donald Trump told the crowd and the cameras at the Republican National Convention a year ago last July, in a speech that keeps suggesting itself to me as one of those moments where history shifted on its axis just a little.

I was sitting there, 100 feet or so behind the back of Trump’s head, next to my Salon colleague Amanda Marcotte. I was feverishly taking pointless notes I would never consult again — the speeches of any public figure are of course meticulously recorded — and Amanda was staring into space and chewing gum so hard I was concerned she might dislocate her jaw. It was deathly quiet in the press section; in retrospect, I think we all understood what was happening and didn’t want to admit it.

If Trump was the voice of those supposedly angry people out in Television Land, the ones with some incoherent sense that their country had been taken away and they wanted it back, what was that voice saying? Because if we can generalize about Trump’s public utterances over the last couple of years, it might be by observing that almost nothing he says is true. Some of it is deliberate lies, some of it is fantasy or wishful thinking, and a lot of it is crackpot racist-uncle ranting, from the universe where it’s obvious that violent crime is way up (and caused by black people), Mexicans and Muslims are inherently dangerous and Hillary Clinton couldn’t possibly have won the popular vote.

Maybe what the Voice of the People was saying was that reality was not acceptable in its current form — that is, as actually existing reality — and he was here to replace it with another one. There has been a lot of angry, eloquent rhetoric about how facts don’t seem to matter to Trump or his supporters or the Republican elected officials clinging to his coattails with their eyes closed. The tax bill currently being crammed through Congress under completely false pretenses offers a proximate example; we could exhaust ourselves listing dozens of others.

True enough. But maybe the “alternative facts” and manufactured pseudo-reality of Trumpian politics are not a side effect or byproduct but its central purpose or even its meaning. In a series of columns this summer, I tried to develop the late Jean Baudrillard’s thesis that after 9/11 the world had entered a new phase of historical conflict, which he designated World War IV, in which the global capitalist order was effectively at war with itself.

That’s still a useful formulation in terms of understanding the resurgence of both right-wing nationalism and radical leftism in many different places, long after the supposed “end of history.” But when it comes to the Trump phenomenon, it might not go far enough. Although Trump is clearly neither intelligent nor well-informed, he possesses an undeniable performative genius that should not be underestimated, and has consistently befuddled his enemies.

It does no good to keep on exclaiming that his accomplishments are nonexistent and his policies nonsensical, as if that were a discovery that might change anyone’s mind. Those are in fact the pillars of Donald Trump’s presidency. He is waging a war against reality; to this point, reality is losing.

That’s not a new observation; many commentators (myself included) have been making various versions and iterations of this argument for months. It was fleshed out in some detail this week by columnist Thomas B. Edsall, who remains one of the best reasons to read the New York Times. In arguing that Trump “has single-handedly done more to undermine the basic tenets of American democracy than any foreign agent or foreign propaganda campaign ever could,” Edsall makes the important point that Russian interference in the 2016 election is a secondary issue or, as Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky tells him, that “to blame Putin for the mess we are in today would be ridiculous.”

It may be difficult to hold onto that thought amid the unfolding drama of the Robert Mueller investigation, with former national security adviser Michael Flynn apparently ready to flip on the Trump White House and rat out Jared Kushner or others close to the president. But Edsall’s argument that Trump’s assault on democracy goes hand-in-glove with his assault on truth strikes me as even more important. He cites a famous quotation from Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism” that seems to describe our current situation with eerie precision:

One could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Understood in its full contemporary context, that passage may hold the key to the Trump presidency. If fakery is actually the content and purpose of this presidency, and if everybody understands that on some level, then at least we are liberated from the endless media self-torture and amateur anthropology regarding Trump’s “working-class” base in the picturesque hinterlands of hurricane-damaged KenTaco Huts. You know what I’m talking about: What do they want? Why are they so angry? When will they wake up and understand that liberals who condescend to them from afar actually have their best interests at heart?

Let’s give Trump’s voters a little credit: They’re not actually dumb enough to believe that his ludicrous promises can be enacted in the physical world and that his presidency will culminate with a “Game of Thrones”-style border wall, the expulsion of all Muslim and Latino immigrants and the public execution of Hillary Clinton. We’re talking about a class and a nation indoctrinated to believe that power relations will never change, politics is a meaningless charade and American life is defined by boring jobs and endless consumption. (Honestly, under the circumstances it’s hard to blame them for those conclusions.)