On the issues, we don’t get arguments, we get impulses. “I’ve built a multibillion-dollar empire,” he says, “by using my intuition.” Like many public figures who refuse to use written speeches, he believes that everything crossing his mind is worthy of expression, without being edited or organized for the benefit of others. So we get a spew of Trump’s gut feelings. They tend to be resentful of outsiders; immigrants are depicted as “rapists” and drug runners. They assume that Barack Obama was the beneficiary of affirmative action. “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?. . . Let him show his records.”

But mostly Trump’s gut tells him (and thus, automatically, us) that political and scientific elites are evil and scheming, both composed of idiots and capable of sophisticated conspiracies. He has falsely and dangerously asserted a connection between vaccines and autism, rooted in practices set by “pharmaceutical companies, because they probably make more money.” He has described a “GLOBAL WARMING” hoax of an extent so vast that it could only be revealed by capital letters. He famously asserted that public officials were engaged in a conspiracy to conceal the circumstances of Obama’s birth. And when one official tragically died, he pressed the claim to her grave. “How amazing,” Trump tweeted, “the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.”