THE cavalier view some members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle take of the chaos they have unleashed since January 20th has startled both their opponents and many of their Republican colleagues. It should not. The insiders are doing things that Mr Trump promised to do on the campaign trail, and that they have long wanted to see done. And if they are doing it in a way that tramples other people’s sensibilities, then all the better; it is what their supporters would want.

Take the executive order of January 27th that barred citizens of seven mostly Muslim nations from entering America for 90 days, and halted all refugee arrivals for 120 days. So what if it was put together amid such secrecy that Mr Trump’s new secretaries for defence and homeland security were reportedly taken by surprise? Who cares if it was shoddily drafted in a way that saw travellers clutching visas and even green cards denoting legal permanent residency detained by customs officers until federal judges ordered their release? Billionaires from Silicon Valley complaining that their innovation is built on immigration? Protesters at airports and thronging the streets of foreign capitals? Bring it on. Even cases like that of Hameed Khalid Darweesh, an interpreter for the American government in Iraq, detained for nearly 19 hours at JFK airport in New York seemed to make no matter. Mr Darweesh cried as he told reporters he had been handcuffed, asking: “You know how many soldiers I touch by this hand?” Hardliners close to Mr Trump did not flinch when their president was forced to fire his acting attorney-general after she refused to comply with the travel ban. And they showed no sign of worrying that a policy nominally designed to reduce terrorism has little prospect of doing so (see article).

The reason for this bullish insouciance is both straightforward and alarming. The president’s currently most influential advisers believe that he has a mandate to blow up norms of good governance. When he fires bureaucrats who stand in his way, bullies business bosses into keeping jobs in America, browbeats members of Congress and—most deliciously—provokes swooning dismay among journalists, many of the voters who gave him that mandate applaud. With no interest in converting those who oppose him, such support is the best sort of strength.

The policy the executive order laid out is not, after all, an unpopular one. A Reuters/IPSOS poll released on January 31st found 43% of those questioned supported bans on people from Muslim countries as a precaution against terror; among Republicans support was 73%. Demonstrators carrying placards bearing such messages as “We Are All Muslims Now” and “Let Them In” in airports across the country saw the executive order as a version of Mr Trump’s campaign pledge to ban all Muslims watered down with some dubious legal legerdemain (see article), and thus as bigotry. Mr Trump’s supporters read those placards and wondered why any patriot would want to let in foreigners from dangerous lands, imperilling American families.

Mr Trump stokes up such polarisation by defining his opponents as foolish, out-of-touch, disingenuous or actively vicious. He could but fire his acting attorney general, Sally Yates, a career prosecutor who served as deputy attorney general under President Barack Obama, after she said that Justice Department lawyers would not defend the ban against legal challenges, on the basis that its broad intent was possibly unlawful and because her office had a duty to “stand for what is right”. But it was startling to see the White House say that Ms Yates had “betrayed” the Justice Department and add: “Ms Yates is an Obama administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.”After the Democratic leader in the Senate, Charles Schumer of New York, grew emotional while discussing refugees, Mr Trump mocked him, saying: “I noticed Chuck Schumer yesterday with fake tears,” adding: “I’m going to ask him who is his acting coach.”

Mr Trump’s most devoted tribune on television, the Fox News channel commentator Sean Hannity, devoted a segment of a show to the question: “Who is bankrolling the protests taking place at airports across the country?” All the evidence from social media points to the protests being both low-budget and fairly spontaneously organised.

For Mr Trump, belittling critics and intimidating business partners has been second nature for decades. It is a tactical proclivity that aligns well with the strategic agenda of the most zealously anti-establishment figures in his team, led by Stephen Bannon, a rumpled nationalist firebrand. After serving as CEO of Mr Trump’s campaign, Mr Bannon is now the president’s chief strategist. Born into a Democrat-voting working class family in Virginia, Mr Bannon served in the navy and worked at Goldman Sachs before making his fortune as a Hollywood investor and dealmaker, thanks in part to a lucky stake in “Seinfeld”, a sitcom. He went on to run Breitbart, a reactionary and often venomous website.

Since entering the White House Mr Bannon, 63, has revelled in his public image as a Darth Vader-ish villain. He recently told the New York Times that mainstream news outlets had been “humiliated” by the election outcome and were considered the “opposition party” by Team Trump. He advised that the media’s best course would be to “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while”, because journalists do not understand America.

Now I am the master

In 2014 Mr Bannon gave a remarkable address to a conservative conference at the Vatican. He described working-class communities betrayed by “people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado”. The corruption and greed of that rootless elite had caused a crisis in capitalism, Mr Bannon argued, “and on top of that we’re now, I believe, at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism.” His answer lay in the values of the “Judeo-Christian West”, in “strong countries and strong nationalist movements” and possibly in an accommodation with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Though he called Mr Putin a kleptocrat, Mr Bannon suggested that this might matter less than securing Russia as an ally against radical Islamists.

Mr Bannon has the trust of the president on foreign affairs. Witness the decision to give him a guaranteed seat on the National Security Council (NSC), enjoying the same access to that inner sanctum as James Mattis, the defence secretary, and Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state. A move that gives a political strategist privileges no longer enjoyed by the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, who only attends when the agenda touches his military portfolio directly, has been lambasted by foreign-policy grandees as “stone-cold crazy” and “entirely inappropriate”.

Indeed, Mr Bannon seems to have edged aside the national security adviser, Michael Flynn, in the battle for influence. An overbearing former general, Mr Flynn is suffering political death by a thousand briefings. Along with Jared Kushner, a New York businessman who is married to Mr Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and who is a recent but devout convert to America First populism, Mr Bannon has pushed Mr Trump to put into action the campaign promises that won him office.

A key ally is Stephen Miller, a 31-year-old policy adviser. Like some other members of Team Trump he comes from the Senate offices of Jeff Sessions, Mr Trump’s pick as attorney general, one of Washington’s most ferocious opponents of legal and illegal immigration. Mr Miller, who developed a taste for political combat as a right-wing teenager at a liberal high school in Santa Monica, California, has been blamed by some Trump supporters for causing unnecessary fights over immigration policy. Mr Miller, Mr Bannon and others in the president’s inner circle reportedly clashed with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its secretary, John Kelly, a former Marine general, over the fate of citizens from countries on the banned list who hold green cards. The Bannon camp insisted that such residents be admitted only on a case-by-case basis—a trampling of immigration procedures from which the administration later retreated.

Mr Bannon talks of Mr Trump’s election as part of a “global revolt” by nationalists which will sweep away all governments that do not adapt to it. This dramatic historical narrative appeals to Mr Trump, who lauded the British decision to leave the European Union as a populist precursor to his own victory. But for all that the president enjoys humbling elites, he also craves their respect and admiration. He appointed high-flying former generals and titans of commerce to his cabinet because he wished to surround himself with “the best” and impress the world. If such grandees tire of the conflicts and chaos model of some around Mr Trump, their departures would hurt him politically.

Two national-security hawks in the Senate, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have said they fear the travel ban “will become a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism.” Other Republicans in Congress who have pushed back against the policy, though, have griped about questions of process rather than substance, complaining for instance about lack of consultation. Mr Trump was hardly the first choice of presidential candidate for many Republican members of Congress, especially in the Senate. But they are in no mood to topple him: they yearn to cut taxes and slash business regulation, and think Mr Trump will sign the laws that do so.

And they are also frightened. Chaos alarms Republican grandees and their business supporters. But if chaos is what Mr Trump’s most ferocious insurgents seek, and if it serves as a signifier of authenticity to the base upon which the legislators’ electoral fortunes stand, then chaos is a price they will accept, for now.