Oscillating between the America of Kenosha and the America of Mar-a-Lago, Trump is neither fully a revolutionary nor an establishmentarian. He is ideologically indebted to both Patrick Buchanan and Goldman Sachs. He is what the political scientist Stephen Skowronek calls a “disjunctive” President, one “who reigns over the end of his party’s own orthodoxy.” Trump knows that Reaganite ideology is no longer politically viable, but he has yet to create a new conservatism beyond white-nationalist nostalgia. For the moment, all he can think to do is rekindle the embers of the campaign, to bathe, once more, in the stage light. It lifts him up. But what of the public? Does he understand that all citizens will have a hand in his fate?

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