In 2011 he became the best-known face of the birther movement, promoting the notion that Barack Obama was born outside the United States and thus an illegitimate president. “Trump recognized an opportunity to connect with the electorate over an issue many considered taboo: the discomfort, in some quarters of American society, with the election of the nation’s first black president,” Ashley Parker and Steve Eder wrote in The Times. “He harnessed it for political gain, beginning his connection with the largely white Republican base that, in his 2016 campaign, helped clinch his party’s nomination.”

The lowlights of that campaign and then his presidency include the Muslim ban; the repeated references to illegal immigration as an “invasion;” the characterization of migrants as vermin who “pour into and infest” America; the tweet urging four congresswomen of color to “go back” to their countries, though only one of them wasn’t born here; and, of course, the insistence that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the violence at a gathering of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va.

Some of those “very fine people” shouted “Jews will not replace us,” and yet Trump went on to excoriate the Democratic Party in general and Representative Ilhan Omar in particular as anti-Semitic. That’s what I mean about his big lie. He winks at white nationalists, then points a finger in other directions.

He stirs up bigots and bigotry, as he did at the recent rally in North Carolina where they chanted “Send her back” about Omar and at a May rally in Florida where he asked the crowd how to prevent migrants from crossing our southern border. “Shoot them!” a man shouted. The crowd erupted in laughter. Trump’s response was a smile.

Reflect on that in light of what just happened in El Paso. And while you’re at it, go back and reread the presidential campaign announcement speech when he mentioned rapists and drug smugglers from Mexico. It’s not just an aria but an entire opera of grievance, its unalloyed fury trained on supposedly unprincipled actors from places where people’s skin is darker and their names less bluntly phonetic than Donald Trump. It fits with eerie neatness into the “replacement theory” that animated the El Paso gunman, and it’s not meant to inspire or instruct. It’s meant to inflame.

My Times colleague Peter Baker, who covers the White House for The Times, was precisely right when he wrote a few weeks ago that in regard to race, Trump “plays with fire like no other president in a century.” I’ll say. He’s a moral arsonist, and if he determined that the only way to hold on to power was to burn everything to the ground, he’d gladly be king of ashes. To paraphrase Milton: Better to reign over a ruined country than to be just another crass plutocrat in a noble one.