Who, for President Trump, are his people in love? They are “our people.” Now, “our people” are not synonymous with the American people. This president, unlike his predecessors, has never seen himself as the president of all Americans.

No, they are the CPAC crowd, his fans. They are the “tough people,” the people who could make things “very bad” if necessary — police and military and bikers who, the president claimed in an interview with Breitbart News this month, support him. He needs people in his thrall, like that Madison Square Garden crowd. As Lasdun wrote, “Nothing short of dominion over the entire universe could compensate for the wrongs done to him.”

The wrongs, that is, of journalists, judges and Hollywood directors — anyone who thinks the president might just be a dangerous white nationalist charlatan. Why think that? Because Trump, from Day 1, has maligned brown people and Muslims; and, as president, he saw “very fine people on both sides” at the 2017 Charlottesville rally where white nationalists chanted “Jews will not replace us” and a woman who protested, Heather Heyer, was killed.

I am not suggesting Trump resembles Hitler. That should be obvious — but not so obvious that I will refrain from writing this column. The white nationalist mass murderer of Muslims in New Zealand was not out of his mind in seeing Trump as a symbol of “renewed white identity and common purpose.” Trump’s love affair is with revanchist white people who don’t like the demographic look of the 21st century.

Throughout the world today, from Saudi Arabia to the Philippines, from Guatemala to North Korea, bad things happen because the Trump administration winks at them. The United States as moral guardian, however flawed, has vanished.

It’s not that Trump could be dangerous. He is dangerous. People die because the worst leaders know they enjoy the American president’s connivance. The debate on whether Trump is harmless, whether we should laugh away his grotesquerie, is misplaced. I have no doubt that the worst is yet to come. In his own mind, whatever the Mueller report contains, Trump cannot lose.

Greenbaum and his wife moved to Southern California. A fisherman at Newport Pier, Greenbaum died in 1997. There was, as Philip Bump observed in The Washington Post, “a brief mention of his passing in the local news.”