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Perhaps the first ugly thing to crawl out into the light was the rampant distrust in everything and everyone.

Before anyone even knew what had happened, rumors and accusations—from the right, from the left and from the center—began to fly. Those rumors and accusations touted that the whole thing had been staged, that President Donald Trump and the assorted dignitaries never were in any real danger.

The Secret Service agent who was shot—and survived, thank goodness, because the bullet hit his protective vest—might argue that the risk he ran of the bullet flying high and into his head was a high price to pay for playacting.

But this is the nature of trading in conspiracy theories—no matter how absurd they may be—and using them to evade responsibility for one’s own actions or beliefs.

Those who believe—and there are a lot of them—this shooting and the tragic assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, were frauds designed to delude the public don’t think through just how many people would have to stay silent to maintain such a conspiracy.

When the number of people who must keep silent is larger than the number of people who attend the Indianapolis 500 on race day, one can be certain that the truth will come out.

And not in a meme or some other quick-hit social media post.

But it’s easy to see how even preposterous notions have taken hold of the public imagination.

One of the chief purveyors of conspiracy theories is the current occupant of the Oval Office, Trump himself.

He’s spent his entire public career preaching to people that America’s institutions can’t be trusted.

Government can’t be trusted.

The police can’t be trusted.

The courts can’t be trusted.

And, of course, journalists can’t be trusted.

The only thing that can be trusted, he assures his credulous followers, is Donald Trump, a man who has cheated on three different wives, declared bankruptcy at least a half-dozen times to get out from under obligations and been found guilty by a jury of his peers of more than 30 felonies.

Trump’s act has worked because there are things about this brave new world that anger and terrify many Americans. They want to believe that what shakes them is so big—”a conspiracy so immense,” to use a phrase from an earlier, similarly paranoid American era—that it is beyond their capacity to confront.

Or even accept as reality.

So, they turn to a self-proclaimed strong man who swears that he, and only he, can help them.

The problem for Trump is that he has been so good at convincing his disciples that nothing bad that happens to them or him is ever their fault or the act of a lone, deluded individual, they cannot believe what he tells them now.

Because he’s the president.

The government.

The very thing he told them, repeatedly, that they shouldn’t trust.

There would be something ironic, even poetic, about the way Trump’s contempt for both the truth and time-tested American mainstays now undermines his ability to lead and even to be believed … if the stakes weren’t so high.

The discontent in the land that he seeks not to assuage but to exploit has claimed and will claim casualties.

Former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

A Minnesota state legislator and her husband.

Charlie Kirk.

The Indiana lawmakers who were swatted and threatened with pipe bombs just because they opposed a likely illegal redistricting plan.

And the president himself.

Now that the rock has been lifted, all the ugliness it hid is free to roam wherever it will.

In the aftermath of the dinner, the president tried to do what he so often has done—manipulate a tragedy for personal or political benefit—by using the shooting as an argument for his planned gaudy White House ballroom.

It didn’t take.

A public that has been told, repeatedly, by the president and his allies that gun violence doesn’t justify common-sense gun-safety measures won’t believe that it somehow justifies Marie-Antoinette-level excess.

So, here we are, confronted by things that terrify us.

And led by a president who doesn’t want to solve problems, but just wants to find someone to blame for them.