“He often jokes about killing drug dealers,” a senior administration official told Swan. “He’ll say: ‘You know the Chinese and Filipinos don’t have a drug problem. They just kill them.’”

For Trump, toughness obviates restraint. It precludes mercy. It isn’t calibrated but it has a caliber, because toughness means packing heat. Just as striking as his call to arm some teachers — “only the best,” he tweeted — is his inflated estimate of how many of them are adept with firearms and his romanticizing of that group.

He said that if a Parkland football coach who died while shielding students had been carrying a gun, “he would have shot and that would have been the end of it.” That’s a huge leap, but for the president, contact sports and marksmanship are of a manly piece.

Responsible Americans are calling for more safety in football. Trump advocates the hardest possible hits.

In the wake of disasters natural and man-made, he lavishes his words on the rescuers, the police officers, the paramedics. They deserve every syllable, but he sometimes shortchanges the victims. It’s action that interests him, not vulnerability, and he made that clear long ago, with his casual dismissal of American prisoners of war. “I like people that weren’t captured,” he said, in answer to a question about Senator John McCain.

He elevates coal miners over computer pioneers. Real men have dirt or dust under the nails.

His are neat and clean. “He’s the opposite of a tough guy,” his biographer Michael D’Antonio said. “He’s a frightened guy. A tough guy wouldn’t have to demonstrate it.”

I asked a renowned psychiatrist about the way that Trump surrounds himself with military generals and moons over authoritarian leaders. He noted that boys between the ages of 6 and 10 “get fascinated with Superman and all these powerful figures because of their own puniness.” Perhaps some 71-year-old billionaires do likewise.