Masha Gessen, a Russian-born journalist, writes in the New Yorker about Trump’s big speech, when he accepted renomination for the presidency. I did not watch. Trump makes me physically ill. I can’t bear to watch people in authority tell boldfaced lies without anyone correcting them. I heard he read from the teleprompter in a sing-song voice, which is always challenging for him because reading is hard for him and he mispronounces words.

On Thursday night, Donald Trump stood on the South Lawn of the White House and spoke for more than an hour. Nominally, this was the final speech of the Republican National Convention, during which Trump accepted the Party’s nomination for a second term as President. (He mangled this procedural line, saying that he accepted the nomination “profoundly,” rather than “proudly,” as his script indicated.) But Trump looked less like a candidate than like a king standing in front of his castle, flanked by members of his dynasty, warning of an insurgency at the gate. The entire four-day spectacle of the Convention seemed designed to assert the existence not of a government, which begins and ends with elections, but of a Trump regime, born of a revolution and challenged by what Trump called “anarchists, agitators, rioters, looters, and flag-burners.”

Trump’s use of the White House, where he appeared every day of the Convention; the Washington Monument, illuminated by fireworks at the Convention’s finale; Fort McHenry, where Vice-President Mike Pence delivered his speech on Wednesday; and the U.S. government-owned Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, where most of the Convention speeches were delivered, is, on the face of it, a violation of the Hatch Act, which bans the use of federal property for campaign purposes. It is also an assertion of impunity: violations of the Hatch Act are punishable by removal from office, but Trump shows that he can get away with this just as he gets away with using the Presidency for personal profit and rejecting congressional authority during impeachment proceedings. It is also a territorial claim. Toward the end of his speech, Trump went on an apparently unscripted riff about the White House: “The fact is, I’m here. What’s the name of that building? But I’ll say it differently, the fact is, we’re here, and they’re not. To me, one of the most beautiful buildings anywhere in the world, and it’s not a building, it’s a home, as far as I’m concerned. It’s not even a house, it is a home.” It is his home, he seemed to say, and the “socialists,” as Democrats were repeatedly—and inaccurately—branded throughout the Convention, are trying to divest him of his property.

The Trump regime represents a break with the past. Unlike at the Democratic National Convention, no past Presidents spoke at the Republicans’ gathering; every night was anchored by Trump’s family members. The Republican Party dispensed with a platform this year, and its entire agenda could be summed up on a single sheet of paper: the Party supports Trump. Most speakers at the Convention talked of Trump as having wrought revolutionary change, ushering in a new political era—indicating, again, that Trumpism is not merely the governing philosophy of another Republican Administration. It is a new system entirely.

Having survived impeachment, Trump understands that he is now beyond the reach of the law. He can do whatever he wants, with impunity. The only force that can stop him is the voters.