WASHINGTON — Donald Trump slipped into the Oval Office through a wormhole of confusion about the American identity.

We weren’t winning wars anymore. They just went on and on and on, with inexplicable and deceptive aims and so many lives and limbs and trillions lost.

We couldn’t believe in our institutions, with breaches of trust and displays of ineptitude.

We were moving from a white-majority, male-dominated country and manufacturing base to a multicultural, multilateral, globalized, P.C., new energy, new technology world, without taking account of the confusion and anger of older Americans who felt like strangers in a strange land.

Among many, the allure of Barack Obama’s brainy nuance had given way to a longing for a more muscular certainty.