Is Trump a racist? Or something worse?

President Trump has shown an unwillingness to challenge the hardcore right. We saw the most vivid example of this in the campaign when following David Duke’s endorsement of his candidacy, he refused to disavow it, affecting falsely not to know who the white supremacist leader was.

In Charlottesville, Va., here they were again, the very people Trump evidently conceives of as a core element of his base, carrying torches, adorning themselves with swastikas, running riot and allegedly committing murder. Trump came under enormous pressure to criticize them. When he declined to do so in a fullthroated way, he came under intense criticism. Forty-eight hours later, by the time he succumbed to the pleas of his desperate advisers and agreed to read from the teleprompter the words they told him the nation was waiting to hear, it was too late.

The result, for Trump, was the worst of all worlds. He meant not a syllable of what he had said and was being slammed for it all the same. Republicans were now joining Democrats in castigating him. Even worse, CEOs of megacompanies were bidding adieu to his manufacturing council.

On Tuesday at Trump Tower, we saw all these crosscurrents converge. The result was a rant that made even his advisers visibly cringe. He showered praise on the fanatical racist losers who invaded Charlottesville. To be sure, some of them were “bad,” he said, but many others were “fine people,” with a perfectly valid permit, “protesting very quietly” against “the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

Given such a defense of racists, the question naturally arises: Is Trump a racist himself? From the Judge Gonzalo Curiel affair to the Central Park Five to his illegal practices as a New York landlord, there is a wealth of evidence. But Trump might not be a racist and might well be something worse.

Consider that to those injured in the rampage that killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Trump tweeted “best regards.” Consider also that on Tuesday, Trump focused on how Heyer’s grieving mother went on social media and wrote “the nicest things” about him and “thanked me for what I said.”

As the head of a family business in New York, luxuriating in his inherited millions or billions, Trump could live in a fantasy world of infallibility and invulnerability. In the White House, that fantasy world is repeatedly being punctured. For the first time the entire world is seeing — he himself is seeing — how severely limited he is.

Believing in nothing but his own greatness, concerned with no one but himself and the extensions of himself who are his children, the man we watched boiling over in Trump Tower, the president of the United States, the man who boasts “I’ve had tremendous success,” is a solipsist whose defective self is being inexorably destroyed as it falls under the relentless scrutiny that attends public life in our democracy.