In the same way, it would be difficult to draw a sharp line between nihilism and racism, or to find a trace of one without some germ of the other. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”—a twenty-first-century reader is almost made dizzy by the simultaneous affirmation that such things as truth, self-evident truth, and human equality exist (along with the gross depravity of the slaveholders who wrote and signed the document, though they could not escape the reproach of its implications). All societies, and certainly all democratic societies, rest on the notion that some values are self-evident. That is surely what Walt Whitman means when, after celebrating himself and singing himself, he goes on to say, “and what I assume you shall assume.” The fundamental equality of your self and my self is what allows us to have common assumptions and to believe they are common. Lose hold of that faith and no body camera on earth will capture the resulting disconnect, because people will not accept that the murder they witnessed “really happened” or that the unarmed suspect bleeding on the sidewalk was a human being who felt a bullet the same way they would.

A sense of radical incredulity, spectacularly typified by Trump’s refusal to believe his own intelligence services, is but one manifestation of the nihilism that brought him to power. What makes him “the real deal” in the eyes of his most ardent admirers is largely his insistence that almost everything else is fake. Like him, they know that the news is fake, the melting ice caps are fake, the purported citizenship of certain voters is fake, science is fake, social justice is fake, the whole notion of truth is fake. Whatever isn’t fake is so relative that it might as well be fake; “true for you,” maybe, but that’s as far as it goes. Among those who call themselves “believers” and are thus at least technically not nihilists, one frequently finds an obsession with apocalypse, a gleeful anticipation of the living end that will destroy the inherent fakery of all things. The social teachings of the Gospels need not trouble the Christian conscience so long as the troubles predicted in Revelation come to pass.

Not that Revelation features any event quite so diabolically nihilistic—and, yes, unbelievable—as a school shooting. The person looking for nihilism in its purest form need look no further than the de facto normalization of gunning down schoolchildren as an act of free expression—and, what is more, as an expression of nothing much in particular beyond the whim to do it. Less a “cry for help” than a grunt of “whatever.” What makes school shootings almost as interesting as they are atrocious is that they place an insupportable burden of proof on people whose knee-jerk response to any social calamity is to say, “This stuff has always gone on, we just didn’t hear about it.” Actually, no. In the same way as antecedents for Donald Trump can be found in Roman tribunes and Nazi demagogues but not in any previous American president, you will search the historical record in vain for persuasive evidence confuting that nihilism in this country is something new.

New doesn’t preclude boring, of course. In less murderous forms, you can see nihilism at work in the banal iconoclasm that exults in anything outrageous, provocative, or “transgressive,” that sees no qualitative difference between the offensive and the genuine. So you have Columbine, and then you have radio talk show host Howard Stern marveling aloud why the killers didn’t pause during the slaughter to have sex with the “really good-looking girls running with their hands over their heads.” Definition of a nihilist: someone who thinks nothing contained in the envelope is ever as important as pushing it. “One must shock the bourgeois,” Baudelaire is supposed to have said, speaking at a time when the bourgeoisie could still be shocked. I wonder what Baudelaire would have made of late-night TV. I wonder how many of those who tuned in to Saturday Night Live to see Alec Baldwin impersonating Donald Trump realized the extent to which Trump himself is an impersonation of Saturday Night Live.