In the end of Trump’s presidency, Griffin told Oltmann, there was a lesson. “God wants to use us on the local level,” he said. “God will begin to raise Davids up all across the United States in a powerful way. And I think that we will get our country back.”

This was the space where Griffin and Mastriano met, the ground on which each had been walking when they passed through the security barriers on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. It was what made Mastriano’s rallies feel different from Trump’s — not an imitation of them but a step beyond them. He and Griffin were lesser politicians than Trump, but they possessed a register that Trump did not and that the Tea Partyers before him did not.

Trump had jolted American politics, probably irrevocably, by urging his supporters to see themselves as an American people distinct from the American population — a people whose particular loyalties, identities and values designated them as the nation’s true inheritors, regardless of what the ballots might have said. If this vision was enabled by his ego, which took him to places no other American president had dared to go, it was also constrained by it, limited by Trump’s inability to imagine much of anything outside himself. This was the paradox of the final, desperate act of his presidency: The hole he punched in American democracy, out of sheer self-interest, had allowed his followers to glimpse a vision of the country restored to its divinely ordained promise that lay beyond that democracy — but also beyond him.