It turns out the knack for selling “luxury” to people with no concept of value is the same as the one for selling “liberty” to people with no instinct for democracy. The key ingredient, in both salesmanship and demagogy, is authenticity, or the ability to be true to oneself without being the least bit truthful. Donald Trump is authentic the way Ronald Reagan was sincere. Reagan had the ability, as his own media consultant once said, “to convince himself that the truth is what he wants it to be. Most politicians are unable to do this, but they would give their eye teeth if they could.” Just as Reagan could tell a lie without troubling his conscience, so Trump is only more authentic the more he utters comical non sequiturs or outright fictions. What is uniquely appalling about Trump is not that he lacks civic virtue but that he draws mass appeal from its opposite, from an instinct for travestying civic norms, at which the man, it must be admitted, is an absolute maestro.

Little in Trump’s biography suggested he would grow up to lead a mass protest movement rooted in anti-establishment rage. How can a person who was handed such a plushy life speak so naturally to working-class resentments? How is it a man who inherited a fortune can so confidently reassure the Last—men and women who only a year or so ago he would have cheerfully called out as “losers”—that they, under President Trump, shall be First? Avoiding a lot of Rosebud doublespeak, I think we can trace Trump’s political instinct to a less personal, more sociological source. In this we need only look to his birth certificate. There we see that Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946. Is it possible Trumpismo, in its disdain for norms of speech and conduct, in its underlying craving for apocalyptic violence, is traceable to one simple fact? In almost plain sight, beneath the worldly swagger and breathtaking arrogance, lies Donald Trump the baby boomer....

As did Donald Trump. The Art of the Deal borrows its title from The Art of War, and at the end of Trump 101: The Way to Success, Trump recommends you read only 10 books; there on the list, next to Machiavelli and Norman Vincent Peale, is Sun Tzu. Only a year or so ago, Trump tweeted out the Sun Tzu epigram “He who defends everywhere, defends nowhere.” Never one to settle for the garden-variety howler, Trump, who was shipped off to a posh military school as a teenager, has insisted, “I always felt I was in the military,” or “I always felt I was in the military in the true sense.” What did Trump do, when confronted by the actual sacrifice of John McCain? He simply negated it, ex tempore, with bluster. Thus Trump completed the boomer triple play: He evaded service; he nonetheless arrogates to himself the language of military valor; and he treats those who actually served as chumps....

Ur-boomer that he is, scarcely a sentence Trump utters could not be categorized as a compensatory boast and placed in one of four bins: I inherited nothing; I am a pure product of my own high aptitude; I am a warrior; and somewhat less obviously, though most consequentially, Together, at last, we will make a single generation. The first three are delivered with the usual belligerence of a man who believes the opposite of what he says. The final boast, however, is the most revealing. In addressing the white working class as would-be savior, Trump, chief beneficiary of boomer privilege, will make good to the victims of that privilege, to those Americans who have fought in our wars only to watch as their economic self-respect ships off to China. In Trump, we find all the false selves of a generation wrapped into one awful summa. His candidacy is a monstrous act of pseudo-healing, beneath which lies one man’s quest for a personal authenticity he can never, and will never, achieve.