“We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two U.S. Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean,” Williams said during a broadcast. “I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen, ‘I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.’ And they are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making, what is for them, a brief flight over to this airfield.”

“Guest after guest is gushing,” tweeted Sam Sacks, the co-founder of The District Sentinel, a website focused on federal policy. “From MSNBC to CNN, Trump is receiving his best night of press so far. And all he had to do was start a war.”

* * *

Vietnam is often called the first truly televised war. This isn’t exactly right. There were silent films depicting World War I, and government-made newsreels during World War II. But the Vietnam war was the first conflict for which there was a mass television audience in the United States. At the start of the Korean War, in 1950, just 9 percent of American households had a television. By the time the U.S. suffered its first casualties in Vietnam, less than a decade later, more than 85 percent of American households had TVs.

Vietnam was, in this way, the first “living-room war,” as it is sometimes called, a description that’s as apt as it is unsettling.

The media theorist Marshall McLuhan once argued that “every new technology necessitates a new war,” a viewpoint that his critics say unfairly absolves humans from blame. But history has shown us that any technology that’s used to document human life will eventually be used to document death, too.

Real-time field reports of 21st-century wars, however, are “a long march from the work of Matthew Brady, the Civil War photographer whose pictures showed the dead, Americans all, stacked like cordwood,” David Carr, the late New York Times columnist wrote in 2003. “There, too, technology was destiny. Mr. Brady’s cumbersome photographic process put a premium on the stillness of the subjects, and no subjects are more patient than the dead. But as photography evolved toward lightweight cameras and higher-speed films, the dead became less visible.”

Brady was embedded with the Army of the Potomac, and he captured thousands of gruesome war scenes—he even toted a pop-up tent to use as a dark room so he could process photographs from battle. Today, his images of the Battle of Antietam are some of the most reproduced images of the Civil War. But when the public first saw them, in a gallery exhibition in 1862, Brady’s photographs depicted carnage unlike anything ordinary citizens had ever seen.

“As it is, the dead of the battlefield come up to us very rarely, even in dreams,” one reporter wrote in reaction to that exhibition at the time. “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”