Trump at his speech in New Hampshire. “If we don’t get tough, and we don’t get smart—and fast—we’re not going to have a country anymore,” he said. “There will be nothing left.” Photograph by Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe via Getty

In the past two decades, as mass shootings have become commonplace in this country, the candlelit vigil has taken its place, alongside the town hall and the voting booth, as one of the places we most associate with American democracy. A generation of politicians has come of age rehearsing the rituals of public mourning and offering appeals to national unity. These rituals—the congressional moment of silence, the Presidential visit to the site of the outrage—may have become scripted, but they do nod toward the existence of a national ideal and a sense of common concern that overrides political pettiness.

It seems useless to observe that Donald Trump does not meet the most basic criteria for a representative of the American people, but he continues to assert that distinction in novel ways, highlighting new deficits and pointing to new implications. Since he became the presumptive Republican nominee, many have feared that a terror attack could galvanize support for Trump and his campaign, which from the start made masterful use of the mandates of fear. Yesterday, in his speech after the murder of forty-nine people at Pulse, a gay night club in Orlando, Trump showed how his Administration would respond to such an outrage.

Trump said, “We cannot continue to allow thousands upon thousands of people to pour into our country, many of whom have the same thought process as this savage killer.” He continued, “We’re importing radical Islamic terrorism into the West through a failed immigration system and through an intelligence community held back by our President.” This is simply not true: the shooters in Fort Hood and Orlando were both U.S.-born citizens, as was one of the two shooters in the San Bernardino attacks. Johar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who orchestrated the Boston Marathon bombings, were immigrants, but they came to the United States from Kyrgyzstan as children, more than a decade before the attacks. And terror attacks in the United States have actually declined during the Obama years.

Earlier in his speech, he claimed, “If we don’t get tough, and we don’t get smart—and fast—we’re not going to have a country anymore—there will be nothing left.” That is to say that ISIS is capable of achieving what the Soviet Union could not at the height of the Cold War—the destruction of the United States. This is not simply an error of degree but a failure of category. Trump, of course, offered himself as our only apparent savior. “We have an incompetent Administration, and if I am not elected President that will not change over the next four years,” he added.

We have seen how, in the wake of national tragedies, the gun lobby doubles and triples down on its positions. After the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting, the National Rifle Association's executive vice-president, Wayne LaPierre, said that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Trump’s response to the Orlando attack riffed on that theme, further justifying the nativistic streak that was already so prominent in his campaign. Hours after the shooting, he brayed on Twitter that he had been “right on radical Islamic terrorism.” In his speech on Orlando, at St. Anselm College, in New Hampshire, Trump seemed to expand his proposed ban on Muslims entering the country to include large swaths of the globe, saying, “When I’m elected, I will suspend immigration from areas of the world where there’s a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe, or our allies until we fully understand how to end these threats.”

Last week, amid a cascade of criticism, Trump claimed that his comments on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, whom Trump said had a conflict of interest in overseeing a fraud case regarding Trump University because he was born to Mexican immigrant parents, had been misconstrued. But Trump’s reaction to Orlando made clear that those remarks are part of a pattern—more accurately a trench—in his thinking. Some Americans are more American than others to him, based on their skin color and religion. In his speech, Trump held the immigration system responsible for the actions of the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen—who, like Trump, is a native New Yorker—because, decades ago, it allowed his parents into the country. The killer “was born in Afghan, of Afghan parents, who immigrated to the United States,” Trump said, perhaps deliberately misstating Mateen’s birthplace. “The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here.” Trump also said that Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters, “was the child of immigrants from Pakistan.” Mateen and Farook, of course, were born in the same nation as Dylann Roof, who shot nine African-Americans in Charleston, a year ago this week; Craig Stephen Hicks, who murdered three Muslim Americans in North Carolina, last February; and Adam Gadahn, the American Al Qaeda spokesman who was killed last year, in Pakistan.

Trump’s concept of graduated citizenship coexists comfortably with his insistence that collective responsibility be placed on the communities he considers suspicious. “Now, the Muslim community, so important,” he said. “They have to coöperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad. They know it. And they have to do it, and they have to do it forthwith.” This thinking is not unfamiliar to anyone who has observed how racism works, how it suggests that one must constantly prove oneself worthy of trust. If applied consistently after mass shootings, it would require that we hold the communities in Newtown and Aurora, the students at Virginia Tech, and the residents of the hundred and seventy-nine communities where shootings have occurred responsible for the violence of their neighbors, classmates, and relatives.

Trump inadvertently pointed out that, in the face of a national tragedy, there often occurs something much worse than blandishments and clichéd appeals to unity—the unctuous auctioneering of that grief to political ends. Trump claimed that we are letting people into the country who have “oppressive views and values.” But as Trump, as a candidate, exemplifies, the greatest threat to American values may come from someone who was, in fact, born here.