Every one of the people yet in the White House and those who had slipped out, along with the president’s large traveling retinue, his family, the many members of Congress seeking photo ops with him, and the legions of favor seekers, had all been at rally after rally and, over and over again, had seen vivid demonstrations of the exotic, self-dramatizing, out-from-under-a-rock Trump fan base. But now, to a person, to a political professional, they were dumbfounded and awestruck—revulsion competing with incomprehension.

Even Trump himself, the clearest channel through to this fan base, seemed confused.

In part, the radically faithful had been concentrated. The merely eager party types, and the Las Vegas audience sorts, and the local business proprietors, and the family-outing Republicans, and the VFW Post members, and various church groups, the salt of the Republican earth, more or less in normal dress, all had mostly self-selected out, leaving what was generally, if abstractly, referred to in the Trump circle as the “hard core.” But no one had ever come so clearly face-to-face with this pure hard core as was happening now and would happen, in video footage and in indictments, in the weeks to come.

In some sense, all the currents of the conservative movement—its way of life, its power structure, its institutional identity, its carefully assembled philosophy—had been custom-designed to avoid this moment. The weirdos and misfits; the extremists; the apocalyptic people; the paranoids; the conspiracy believers; the embattled remnants of an active racist world; the followers of Robert Welch, the John Birch Society founder; and the admirers of James B. Utt, the congressman and racist from California’s Orange County (what Fortune magazine in 1968 called American’s “nut country”); and generals like Curtis LeMay, a face of the right wing in the 1950s and ’60s, ready to nuke whoever back to the Stone Age—all these had been for so long sanitized out of the conservative movement. The currents of William F. Buckley Jr. (via Edmund Burke), corporate leadership, Richard Nixon realpolitik, Ronald Reagan morning-in-America politics, upwardly mobile capitalism, family values, and megachurch institutional conservatism had taken over. But now, it turned out, the real right wing had not gone away at all, but, apparently, flourished unseen, becoming ever more baroque, ecstatic, and as far from the bourgeois world as it was possible to get.

The most immediate issue was that no one, at least not in this up-close moment, was going to defend them—nobody employed in the Republican and conservative firmament. Indeed, the cadres were threatening to behead one of the leading representatives of faith-based, institutional, sanitized-to-the-point-of-blandness modern conservatism: Vice President Mike Pence!

This left the hard core with a singular point of political identification: Donald Trump. And it left Trump, at that moment, with, to every man and woman around him, the most horrifying development of his short political career: his singular connection to them.

And to make matters worse, of course, at 6:01 p.m., he tweeted: