In the two weeks since Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, it’s both true enough and obviously, howlingly inaccurate to say that things have returned to “normal.” That just cannot possibly be the right word for the government’s ongoing state of clammy resting breakdown—and yet, as the situation seems to have stepped back from the briefly imminent prospect of an actual hot war, Trump has seemed more and more like himself. A day after the drone strike, when House pedant Dan Crenshaw insisted that Trump had a strategy and was following it, Trump wasted little time in contradicting the Texas congressman. On Twitter, naturally, he framed the conflict he’d created as A Hitting Contest that he could not be seen to lose. Trump continued to perform a series of panicky pivots from one unconvincing justification to another; various advisers and factotums gamely mirrored his erratic choreography, in the vein of Katy Perry’s Left Shark Super Bowl dancing companion—a beat late and reliably a bit off.

A week out from the assassination, Trump whinged and flubbed his way through an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News, in which he insisted that Saudi Arabia had “already deposited one billion dollars in the bank” in exchange for a deployment of U.S. soldiers. He claimed for good measure that the only remaining American troops in Syria “are taking the oil,” and said that he did not think that viewers needed to know about the imminent threats that occasioned the assassination—“Wouldn’t that help your case?” Ingraham added hopefully—beyond the suggestion that Soleimani was planning to attack four American embassies in the region sometime soon. As with much of what Trump said during his first week as A War President, that assertion had not been made before or since.

Because everything about Trump operates from the opening position that he has never been wrong, changed his mind, or contradicted himself; and because he is always wrong and never really knows what he’s saying and is constantly trying to wrench past stridencies into line with his befuddled present, this created a lot of work for everyone. There was a brief effort to spin the assassination of Soleimani as an act of diplomacy through kinetic operations—“an attempt to empower the country’s moderate voices,” as “several administration officials” told The Wall Street Journal. The ungainly human megaphone that exists to amplify and protect the president seemed happiest and most comfortable when claiming that Democrats loved Soleimani and in fact cried when he died because they wanted to hug and kiss him—both because that type of retro smear is a more natural movement for the megaphone operators and because it didn’t require any frantic trips to the memory hole. None of it was very convincing.

Trump really only regained his footing when he decided that the war he had nearly started was now over and won. Various discordant facts about what happened before, during, and after the assassination continued to emerge over time. The Journal reported that Trump pulled the trigger at least in part to appease senators whose loyalty he would need in his impeachment trial; 11 American soldiers were being treated for what Defense One termed “traumatic brain injuries” after the Iranian counterstrike that supposedly left U.S. troops unscathed; in place of the talk about imminent threat(s), Trump now told supporters that Soleimani had been “saying bad things about our country” and so the U.S. president used his maximal geopolitical power to decide “How much of this shit do we have to listen to?”

Last Friday, when Trump welcomed the National Champion LSU football team to the White House, his face was the same gleaming maroon as a Luden’s cough drop, and he once again grandly played the part of Winner Among Winners. “We took out those terrorists like, like, like your football team would’ve taken out those terrorists, right?” Trump extemporized, and the players and coaches behind him shifted their weight and served high-intensity Jim Halpert faces out into the rustling room.