It seemed like a typical Tuesday morning last month when Juan Esquivel noticed a helicopter hovering over the East Texas trailer-parts factory where the Mexican native had worked for much of his 23 years in the United States — doing a hard manufacturing job that few Americans are lining up to do, paying taxes to the federal government and building a middle-class life for his wife and two kids in a quiet community called Honey Grove.

Esquivel's wife was cooking tostados for that night when — as recounted recently by Emily Foxhall in the Houston Chronicle — she got the first text message from her husband at 10:27 a.m., in Spanish: "Immigration is here."

The Aug. 28 raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE — against the Load Trail factory near Paris, Texas, was the largest workplace immigration raid by federal agents in the last decade, with Esquivel one of 159 workers ultimately detained that morning. Yet in Donald Trump's America, where a holy war against undocumented immigration has become a fact of life, and where the latest assault has to compete for airtime against nonstop scandal and sordid tweets, the story wasn't even a blip. But the echoes continue in a working-class community that locals describe as "quaint" but where many residents are now afraid to leave their house. After Paris immigration raid, can a community come together? https://t.co/1KCnvxtjCl — St. John Barned-Smith (@stjbs) September 15, 2018 We've grown far too comfortably numb to the defining feature of Trump's presidency, some 20 months in.

Fear itself.

If you have any doubt that America in 2018 is ruled by this one simple four-letter word, stop in your local bookstore (if you still have one) and pick up a copy of Bob Woodward's new book, the fastest selling U.S. tome of the last several years. There were a lot of things that the famed Watergate journalist could have called his chronicle of chaos and dysfunction inside the White House — "Crazytown" is certainly a fitting contribution to our political discourse — but in the end he went simply with Fear, with the president bathed in a loud shade of fire engine red.

Maybe the reason that Trump's presidency still seems so jarring after all these months is that — while, for the most part, the 43 men (Cleveland twice) who came before him sought on one level or another to soothe and reassure the sometimes fragile American psyche — Trump and his worst minions like deportation-whisperer Stephen Miller wake up every day thinking up new ways to inflame what FDR famously described as "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." Fear isn't a bug in this presidency. It's a feature.

Trumpism only works with fear as its lubricant, and it hits everybody in one way or the other. For the 60 percent who disapprove of Trump in the Oval Office — most of them strongly — there is fear for the future of American democracy, and of what a man who built his racist, xenophobic and misogynistic presidency on a bed of 5,000 lies might do tomorrow. That's bad, but it's nothing like the fear felt by those at Ground Zero of his hate-based policies — the hardworking, taxpaying moms and dads of communities like Honey Grove, Texas, terrified of a knock on the door or a chopper overhead.

But don't forget the flip side of this grim equation: Trump can't govern, stave off impeachment in 2019 or even dream of reelection in 2020 without whipping up fear among his own supporters — elevating a tiny platoon of rock-throwing Antifa into a large scary army, portraying any new progressive as the next Maduro, and, most importantly, keeping his angry base inflamed against The Other, whether that means blasting football players protesting police brutality or lying about crime rates among undocumented immigrants. After a year and eight months, fear is Trump's only card.