I’ve compared Donald Trump to William Jennings Bryan, who forfeited the chance in 1896 to build an alliance of all those discontented with industrial capitalism because he only truly felt at home with rural people—and could not refrain from inflammatory language about cities and city people. Tonight this comparison seems even more valid than ever. Trump’s right about the shock of globalization and the disruption of migration. But it’s not enough to be right to become president, as Henry Clay famously quipped. You have to be right in the right way and at the right time. You have to be the right messenger to carry the right message.

The political observer Michael Barone warned in 1992 that Pat Buchanan would go nowhere in politics because Americans aren’t angry people, and they don’t trust angry people with power. That’s a powerfully and enduringly true comment. Listening to the chants of “Lock her up,” you’d think that this Cleveland convention was enraged. For the first three nights, at least, that was an illusion of the television cameras. Just outside the frame, at any given moment, at least as many delegates were playing Words with Friends as yelling for extra-judicial punishment of Hillary Clinton. On the final night of the convention, the audience seemed to shout the line with real rage. But an indispensable element of Donald Trump’s success to date has been the smirking hint that the whole thing was a scam, and we were all invited to be on the inside of the joke.

But as the anger torques up, the Republican coalition has cracked up. Trump’s message is flaring white-hot—and scaring all those who sense that they have more to lose from convulsive and divisive politics than anybody could possibly gain.