The most incredible thing about last week’s decision in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on detained migrant children is that the case existed at all. The court ruled that the Trump administration had to provide basic health and hygiene supplies, including soap and toothbrushes, to the children in its custody. Justice Department lawyers had argued that such items weren’t necessary to meet the required “safe and sanitary conditions” to hold kids at immigration facilities. The three-judge panel disagreed.

“Assuring that children eat enough edible food, drink clean water, are housed in hygienic facilities with sanitary bathrooms, have soap and toothpaste, and are not sleep-deprived are without doubt essential to the children’s safety,” Judge Marsha Berzon wrote for the court. One of the panel’s members, Judge A. Wallace Tashima, was himself held at a Japanese-American internment camp as a boy during World War II.

The episode amounted to an act of astonishing cruelty toward the children themselves. It was also an enormous waste of everyone’s time and energy.

Litigation, unlike Greek gods, does not spring from the earth fully formed. Lawyers for both sides wrote briefs and memoranda on the legal issues involved, pored through mountains of past cases, and probably even worked long into nights and weekends to meet deadlines. Judges, too, read all of these filings and likely wrote multiple draft opinions on their conclusions. The American legal system spent countless man-hours to decide whether children in federal custody should get soap and toothbrushes.

Wasting time is a defining feature of Trump’s presidency. He is fairly adept at frittering away his own days, spending an indeterminate number of hours languishing in front of the television, simply to watch cable news coverage of himself so he can then offer comments about it on Twitter. But when it comes to wasting the time of everyone around him, the president is without peer. Trump’s haphazard style of governance forces journalists, lawyers, and government officials to expend innumerable hours on doomed initiatives and errant tweets. His corrosive effect on American politics forces Americans to devote far more hours of their life to thinking about him than they should. All of this amounts to a tax of sorts on the national psyche—one that can never be repaid.