Shawn nodded, seriously. We drank to the dream, the steel mill they knew was not coming. It felt good, at least, to believe.

The racism of Trump’s rhetoric is one of its most powerful currents, but it is only a means to an end, which is the exhilaration of winning. So, too, the violence of Trump’s words. It’s not at odds with his secular religiosity; it’s what makes his fantastical wealth imaginable, with Trump as a medium between the emotions we all struggle to control and the power to act on them. One supporter, a designer of women’s bicycling fashions, told me that when Trump says, “I’d like to punch that guy in the face,” or “Boom, boom, boom,” as he jabs his fist to demonstrate how he would handle a protester, it’s the “human moment” of his rallies. She meant the moment when Trump, who is by his wealth freed from our concerns, nonetheless feels what his followers feel, says what they wish they could say.

The mainstays of his rallies are parables, in which he channels such sentiments into full-fledged, multivoiced dramatic scenes. Trump plays every role. There are three scenes in current rotation; if Trump worked off a set list, they might be labeled “The Call,” “The Snake” and “The Bullet.” In “The Call,” he plays President Trump, bringing American companies home through sheer force of will over the phone — or else. This is his parable of strength. In “The Snake,” he reads the lyrics to an old Al Wilson song by the same name, a parable of danger. “Think of it,” he says sometimes, “when we think of people coming into our country, who we don’t know who they are.” He draws out that last word, a long, almost whimsical “arrreee... .” Then, through four stanzas, he toggles between the personae of a wounded snake and a “tender woman” who cradles it to her bosom — only to be bitten. Trump-as-the-serpent hisses, “ ‘Oh shut up, silly woman!’ said the reptile with a grin — ‘You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in!’ ”

Camp comes easily to Trump, and he has an unusual gift for making it earnest. Reagan had it, too, but as the better actor he more inhabited his role without visible contradiction. Reagan’s favorite movie was “High Noon,” a story of an ordinary man who rises to greatness in response to circumstance. Trump’s favorites include “Citizen Kane” and “The Godfather,” stories of titanic ego at which the rest of us can marvel but never truly grasp. Given our limits, we tend to endow those born to a scale beyond our imagination with elements of grandeur or the overblown. Trump’s genius has been to recognize that he can capitalize on both, the power and the comedy. As with the great revivalists of the early 20th century — Billy Sunday with his baseball-themed passion plays, Aimee Semple McPherson making her entrance aboard the ship-shaped automobile of her “Salvation Navy” — camp may undermine Trump’s gravitas, but it amplifies his gravitational field. Gravitas is somber; somber is dull; and dull, to Trump, is impotent. Gravity is a force, and Trump makes his own. The speaking style Trump’s critics call crude — the smirk, smile, snarl and shrug; the digressions; all that is “very, very, very big,” “amazing” or “huge” — represents to his followers not vanity but the public intimacy of a man utterly himself. He does not try to claim, “I’m like you.” His promise is that he’s better than you. Not a servant; a leader. The one who acts.

The darkest set piece in Trump’s current lineup, a parable of strength and danger combined, is the monologue I call “The Bullet.” You can see Trump perform it in the video of the rally he held in Dayton, Ohio, in March, the day after protesters shut down his rally in Chicago. He holds up a fist to show its size, a move played for laughs and power: He’s telling us, again, about the size of his genitals. He gets away with it because he’s joking. “But just to finish on torture,” he continues, although he hasn’t yet begun. “I started by saying they’re chopping off heads. Because you have to do a little bit of warm-up.” So he talks some more about terrorists “chopping off heads,” how hard it is to win when you have “rules.”