On the afternoon that the first of the funerals for the eleven people killed at the Tree of Life synagogue, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, were held, a crowd began to spill over the street and onto the sidewalks and lawns along a stately stretch of Beechwood Boulevard. There is not a word in the American lexicon for such gatherings—the semi-spontaneous assembly of people in the wake of tragedy, who are united by both grief and by anger, and whose public mourning serves to reaffirm their civic bond to one another. But we need such a word, because this ritual happens frequently enough to be familiar—so frequently that its purpose need not be explained to those in attendance. “Are people here to protest against Donald Trump?” I asked a man in the crowd. “They’re here because of everything,” he answered.

“Everything,” in this instance, meant the entire sequence of events that had preceded the shooting deaths of Rose Mallinger, Melvin Wax, Joyce Fienberg, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Irving Younger, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Jerry Rabinowitz, and Richard Gottfried; the factors that had enabled them; and the subsequent ways in which the murders have been woven into the larger rubric of premeditated American tragedy. Tree of Life now enters a glossary of such events; among them, the Emanuel A.M.E. Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, the site of another mass shooting, on June 17, 2015, in another house of worship, committed by another white nationalist, became the closest case study.

Jamie Gibson, the senior rabbi at Temple Sinai, which is not far from the Tree of Life synagogue, had helped to organize a vigil three years ago, for those who had died in Charleston. The attack in Pittsburgh on Saturday brought recollections of that vigil back into focus. “I think that the people who devise these plans and get hold of these murderous weapons have created an entire world in their mind where it makes sense,” he told me. “They have an enemy. The enemy is an African-American, the enemy is a Jew. And they can only feel safe if they protect themselves.” Malcolm Graham, whose sister Cynthia Graham Hurd was killed at Emanuel, told me that hearing about Pittsburgh “was like a punch in the gut.” The news had pulled him back to the moment when he learned of his sister’s death. J. A. Moore, whose sister Myra Thompson was also killed at Emanuel, told me, “My first thought was how this was going to affect all the family members in that community. It immediately flashed me back to June of 2015.”

In Charleston, a member of Emanuel had told me that the process of healing was made doubly difficult by the fact that the attack had claimed the lives of people who would otherwise have steered the church through difficult times, including its pastor, Clementa Pinckney, who also served as a state senator. Those who died at Tree of Life were said to be among its most faithful attendees, part of the nucleus of a larger congregation. The attacks also share an inscrutable dissonance of heavily armed men firing rounds at utterly defenseless targets: the oldest victim in the synagogue was the ninety-seven-year-old Rose Mallinger; the oldest in the church was the eighty-seven-year-old Susie Jackson.

The architects of these atrocities are white men whose fury was amplified in the echo chamber of the Internet. Notably, both shooters conceived of their actions as a form of self-defense. Robert Bowers, the man accused of the Pittsburgh shootings, reportedly wrote, in his last post on Gab, a social-media network favored by the alt-right, that he would not stand by while his people were “slaughtered.” In Charleston, just before Tywanza Sanders, a twenty-six-year-old member of Emanuel A.M.E., died, he asked the gunman, Dylann Roof, why he was committing murder. Roof replied, “Because you all are raping our women and taking over the world.” Roof’s language was striking because, just a day earlier, in a gaudy, absurdist spectacle in Manhattan, Trump had declared his Presidential candidacy, citing a scourge of Mexican rapists as part of his motivation.

Albeit in vastly different ways, Trump and Roof were responding to a common Zeitgeist of racial paranoia. Bowers had reportedly expressed disdain for Trump in social-media posts, fuelled by his belief that the President viewed Jews too favorably. But Bowers shared Trump’s terminology for the caravan of Central American migrants winding its way north through Mexico: the migrants are, in the estimation of both men, “invaders.” Trump has both promoted and profited from the racial siege mentality. The other significant overlap between what transpired in Charleston and the morass of horror in Pittsburgh lies less in what the murderers did than in the responses of the wider culture that surrounded them.

It was necessary, and therefore predictable, that Roof would be understood as a singularly troubled youth rather than as a vector of a broader ill or as a reflection of a set of mores deeply rooted in American history. He posed for photographs holding the Confederate flag, yet people I spoke with in the Confederate Museum, in Charleston, rejected the idea that his actions could be seen as a logical extension of valorizing an army that had fought primarily for the preservation of white supremacy. In Pittsburgh on Tuesday evening, a tall white man in his fifties, with long hair and a tan windbreaker, jabbed his finger at a young protester and rebuked him for suggesting that Bowers may have felt validated by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. The President was “not responsible for this!” the man shouted. “You’re politicizing this tragedy!” He was the embodiment of a minority opinion on that street at that moment, but, beyond the liberal preserves of Pittsburgh, in the broader precincts of America, he was not alone in this thinking. “The President is not responsible for these acts,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said, two days after the shootings.

This is part of a broader paradox in which Trump’s heroism—to that portion of the public that deems him a hero—derives from his projection of a particular version of masculine authority. The country had fallen far from its pinnacle, he told the delegates at the Republican National Convention in 2016. “I alone can fix it,” he said. The election thereby became an exercise in a kind of circular logic: Trump is powerful, so he should be given more power. Yet he is simultaneously exonerated from responsibility for the myriad failures that have occurred on his watch by the idea that he is powerless to affect such matters.

The biggest indictment of the moral calibration in Trump’s Presidency is found in the sheer frequency by which he is absolved by his most ardent supporters. The man who sent explosive devices to men and women whom Trump had named as enemies of the nation, or had scorned as rogues skirting the consequences of their actions, was not someone prompted by the President’s words but, rather, a lone lunatic. The shooter who reportedly preyed upon a mostly elderly group of worshippers, in part, because the synagogue housed a congregation that supported work on behalf of refugees, was not responding to a corrupted dialogue about immigration but was simply drunk on the ancient bias of anti-Semitism. Yet the arithmetic is inescapable—all the singulars become a plural, and that plural is the collective face of a volatile white-nationalist movement whose ascent corresponds closely to Trump’s, who took comfort in his equivocating over the moral lines in Charlottesville, and who understood his declaration “I am a nationalist,” last month, as evidence that he had forgone his dog-whistle appeals to them in favor of sounding a bullhorn.