In some vital center of his appeal—and what distinguished him was that he understood this while almost nobody else did—he existed not in the professional zone, with all the other careerists in the federal government, but in the emotional zone of his fan base.

This was a real and exceptional sort of populism. He egged the fans on, and they egged him on. He knew nothing about government, and they knew nothing about government, so the context of government itself became beside the point. It was one-on-one, direct. He had charisma in the Christian sense.

At the same time, he was the star—never forget that—and the base was his audience.

Trump often expressed puzzlement over who these people were, their low-rent “trailer camp” bearing and their “get-ups,” once joking that he should have invested in a chain of tattoo parlors and shaking his head about “the great unwashed.”

On Saturday, December 12—little more than three weeks before rioters and revelers would disastrously appear again in Washington on January 6—several thousand Trump fans and fanatics had gathered in the capital. The Trump fan base here was segmented down, post-defeat, to impassioned supporters of the election challenge, its most self-dramatizing and ecstatic core.

There were the Proud Boys in elaborate dress, ZZ Top beards and tie-dyed kilts—Enrique Tarrio, a Proud Boy organizer, got in line and took a public tour of the White House—who seemed to have appointed themselves Trump protectors and vanguard as the Hell’s Angels had once done for the Rolling Stones. There were Trump impersonators and a wide variety of other made-for-the-cameras MAGA costumes. There were veterans—or people in military gear trying to suggest patriotism and firepower. There were old men and women, too—more Las Vegas than Altamont. Virtually all without masks.

“It’s like Let’s Make a Deal,” said Trump the next day to a caller, referencing the long-running game show from the 1960s—somehow yet his psychic era—where audience members dressed up in foolish costumes to get the attention of the host.

The speakers at the December 12 event were themselves a retinue of Trump attention seekers: Michael Flynn, the former general who had briefly served as Trump’s national security advisor before being rolled out of office for lying to the FBI, had, after pleading guilty, reversed himself and abjectly reaffirmed his Trump loyalty, finally getting his pardon just days before the rally. Sebastian Gorka, a figure of uncertain provenance and function in the Trump White House during its first months, was one of the early oddballs to be pushed out when John Kelly became chief of staff and had pursued a Trump-based media career ever since. Also speaking, Alex Jones, the conspiracy auteur, and MyPillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell, a former drug addict and a current fevered conspiracist.