The first lady’s jacket of all trades: It is, on top of everything else, just one more reminder of how urgently relevant Boorstin’s 20th-century ideas remain in the 21st. What could be more overcomplicated than a piece of clothing, its question and its mark, expanding to occupy so much space in the fickle American psyche? What could be more self-defeating than that occupation crowding out the ostensible reason for the donning of the jacket in the first place: a trip to visit children who have been torn away from their families by the American government?

We do, as a matter of reflex, precisely what Boorstin feared we would when he warned about the triumph of pseudo-reality in American life: We capitulate to images. We allow ourselves to be distracted, so easil—sorry, I lost my train of thought. We lose sight of the real story until finally we lose the point.

Which is a very old idea, of course, but also a distinctly new one; the more recent twist on it is that we’ve now simply upped the game for the digital age. It’s no longer merely a matter of events existing to become media; it’s now a matter of events existing to become memes. The media event gives way to the meme event. Obama’s tan suit. Clinton’s BlackBerry. Melania’s inaugural smile-frown. So many, many more. Things happen, silly things and sweeping things, and they are not simply news events; they are also fodder for collaborative joke-making and truth-squadding and meaning-making. The stories shed their contexts. Their readers lose their place. That’s often a very good thing. It is occasionally a very bad thing.

What’s especially striking about Melania Trump’s trip to Texas is how neatly it served as both types of Boorstinian event, as media and as meme, at the same time. The first lady’s voyage, after all, no matter how much her staff insisted it was, was not a great work of nuanced humanitarianism. It was a performance. It was a “surprise” trip that was, of course, no surprise at all to the photographers and film crews assembled to document it.

The cameras were there as the first lady boarded the plane at Joint Base Andrews, Secret Service agents in tow. They were there when she disembarked in Texas—when she briefly interviewed the heads of the shelter. And when she posed with policemen, and Border Patrol agents. And when the visitor and the visited, arranged at a table in front of a tree made out of a collage of brightly colored construction paper (“Acts of kindness make me bloom,” the foliage announced), engaged in a stiff conversation about the ways children cope with trauma.

The cameras were there when, after an extremely brief amount of time had elapsed—“Plans for her to visit a second facility where children housed in cages were seen by the Associated Press last week were canceled because of flooding there,” the AP reported—Trump got back on the plane again. They were there when she disembarked in the Washington area, wearing the jacket once more. They were there from the first act to the last, ready to bear witness to her bearing of witness. “She wants to see what’s real,” the first lady’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, told CNN, without a hint of irony. “She wanted to see as close to what she had been seeing on TV.”