Article II of the US Constitution is the presidential job description, defining and enumerating the responsibilities and formal powers of that office.

But as every American president since George Washington has eventually discovered, the most important power at the chief executive’s disposal is an entirely informal one, the power of persuasion.

Harry Truman, president between 1945 and 1953, once famously said: “I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do things they ought to have the sense to do without my persuading them. That’s all the powers of the president amount to.”

And this remains as workable a definition as any of the scope and limits of presidential authority. The occupant of the Oval Office needs to be able to influence and inspire and at times project a sense of granite resolve whether he’s dealing with a recalcitrant Congress, a potentially hostile foreign power or a foot-dragging electorate; he needs to sometimes woo, sometimes coax, sometimes cajole and occasionally lead public opinion rather than being led by it for reasons of overarching principle and ensuring the collective good.

An individual president’s persuasiveness is based on any number of factors. But when his personal authority and prestige, moral strength and ability to make compelling arguments are of a piece with the authority and prestige of the Oval Office you end up with a Truman or a Lyndon Johnson, a Ronald Reagan or a Barack Obama, presidents who were able to speak with both moral authority and moral clarity, presidents whose personal qualities when combined with the power of the Oval Office were sufficient, as one historian put it, to “convince … [others] that what the White House wants of them is what they ought to do for their own sake”.

Of course, in the absence of any qualities whatsoever you end up with a presidency like Donald Trump’s.

The current Commander In Chief’s sole interest seems to be in keeping his ever-dwindling base of supporters persuaded they remain under threat culturally, religiously and politically from the various “bad people” who he claims pose imminent dangers to the American way of life. Clearly these “bad hombres” do not include white supremacists, neo-Nazis or other nativist hate groups as Trump’s vacillating and morally reprehensible response to the recent racist violence in Charlottesville demonstrated.

Trump is, of course, both the embodiment and sad culmination of what American political culture has been steadily devolving into in recent decades. The various socio-economic and cultural chasms which have been opening up in America have been augmented and, in many ways, entrenched as a result of the Great Recession and a concurrent fragmentation in the media.

The emergence of a populist, often nativist, national echo chamber composed of right-wing talk radio shows, gleefully offensive and aggressive online sites like Breitbart and, of course, FoxNews — which pioneered and popularised the anti-establishment, anti-elite and anti-egghead tone now favoured by media-savvy reactionary conservatives — has led to a highly destabilising form of political polarisation, one which can now result in disagreement over even basic facts.

These days, with facts being what you want rather than what they actually are, populist conservatism consistently offers answers which are clear, simple and spectacularly and patently wrong to any number of the complex questions facing the US.

And given so many of those questions revolve around the fear these combatively anti-establishment outsiders traffic in and promote — fear of terrorism, fear of crime, fear of racial and religious minorities, fear of social change, fear of economic insecurity, fear, even, of some institutions and agencies of the American government — is it any wonder Trump first made headway in the Republican primaries and then won the election by promising to restore order and control to an America he routinely depicted as being far more chaotic than it actually was? (never mind that “the American carnage” he referenced in his inauguration address was belied by several decades’ worth of data on violent crime — if you haven’t got a fact, an alternative fact will do).

No, the Trump candidacy was never a sideshow given this new media environment: his mastery of the art of message discipline, his understanding of how to use broadcast and cable TV, radio and social media to amplify his fearmongering, always made him a serious contender no matter what his critics in the Republican and Democratic old guard and the establishment media chose to believe.

Ultimately he was able to cobble together an electoral college victory last November despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by encouraging what was described during another period of populism and demagoguery in America as “an atmosphere of fervent malice and humourless imbecility”.

He proved just persuasive enough in just the right combination of states to channel sufficient voter anger on polling day by promising solutions to their fears — the same fears he had repeatedly invoked, falsely validated and then repeatedly returned to in both his primary and general election campaigns.

And, make no mistake about it, exploiting and inflaming his white working class base’s latent fear of the “other” — whether the other was African-American, Mexican, Chinese or Muslim — was a recurring theme during his presidential run. Don’t forget he launched his political career by enthusiastically championing the Big Lie of Birtherism, the notorious hoax suggesting that the first African-American president wasn’t actually an American. And this wasn’t so much a dog-whistle to racists as a blaring ship’s horn signalling where his sympathies lay, at least for reasons of political expediency and electoral calculus.

For Trump and his equally opportunistic enablers realised from the outset that the type of fear-based movement they were launching would thrive best in a climate of paranoia and near-constant hysteria. And this would require a steady stream of enemies (or “enemies of the people” as Trump sometimes puts it), a category which eventually encompassed everyone from the last President of the United States to foreigners to refugees to racial and cultural minorities to the mainstream press to the millions of imaginary undocumented immigrants who the White House still claim illegally cast ballots for Hillary Clinton and put her over the top in the popular vote count last November.

Trump is not, of course, given to reflection or analysis or placing the greater good ahead of his own. He rarely sees, or even looks for, two sides to any question. Indeed divisiveness, not unity, remains a constant motif. He has said as much himself. When he refers to the American “people”, he only means his people —that minority of them who embrace his brand of intolerant nativism, economic nationalism, anti-elitism and populism.

“The only important thing is the unification of the people, because the other people don’t mean anything,” he said in May 2016.

Given Trump’s annihilating moral indifference to anyone or anything which does not further his own self-interest, this means there was never much chance of him repudiating the white supremacists responsible for the deadly violence in Virginia.

Why, with opinion poll figures already in free fall and corporate, military and even Republican legislative leaders putting increasing distance between themselves and the president, would he risk alienating voters who remain among his most steadfast supporters, voters whose racial resentments he has actively stoked for the last two years?

Perhaps the fact he is now regarded as such a singularly unpersuasive and unsympathetic figure just eight months into his term may finally be driving home the point to the cooler heads in his inner circle that Trump’s reality-optional form of politics works better on the campaign trail than in the Oval Office. ?Perhaps his aides are waking up to the fact the genuine American carnage which must be confronted now is that which he is inflicting on civil liberties, minority rights, the rule of law and the checks and balances of government power on a daily basis.

But in order for there to be the type of major course correction which is clearly necessary, Donald Trump would first have to concede there has been a major navigational error — and then he would have to persuade a broad enough swath of public opinion he was in earnest about remedying it. Given the president’s “never retreat-never surrender” mantra, neither possibility seems very likely.