Experts differ on the appropriate way to acknowledge an Air Force fighter jet flyover. Saying “thank you,” however loudly, doesn’t seem sufficient; the planes are very far away and moving very quickly, after all, and generate an ear-splitting wake of raw noise. While the Air Force Thunderbirds flew over Las Vegas on Saturday in what the secretary of the Air Force called a “salute to the first responders, health providers & the entire Nation #inthistogether,” a simple “you’re welcome” doesn’t quite feel like the right response, either. Thunderbirds commander Lt. Col. John Caldwell said the purpose of the mission was for the broader public, essential employees and inessential employees and newly minted un-employees and everyone else, to notice that the flyover was happening. “We want Las Vegas residents to look up from their homes and enjoy the display of American resolve and pride,” Caldwell said, “while keeping front-line coronavirus responders in their hearts during this unprecedented time in our nation.” The basic message seemed clear at last: When in doubt, cheering will do.

In the absence of any sense of progress or even directed movement, and under the immense pressure of various glaring contradictions and increasingly undeniable institutional collapse, American national life first spiderwebbed and then exploded into little episodic shards. The pebbled remains of it cannot be readily pieced back together; no edge really seems to fit with any other, or is even identifiable as having once comprised any particular part of the now completely broken whole. All of it came from the same shattered thing, but each little moment is entirely its own: a thank-you flyover from a squadron of F-16’s over an empty city; the president reading a long list of CEO’s names in the White House’s rose garden for reasons that are not immediately clear; a man tearfully telling a Fox News reporter that Michigan must be opened for business so he can buy lawn-care products; pallets of hoarded hand sanitizer hauled out of a personal storage facility by agents of the state; impossibly obtuse celebrities singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” into their phones on social media; a couple thousand people dying the same way, of the same virus, every single day.

Every president shapes the broader cultural moment he presides over, but the greatest and bleakest and most singular achievement of Donald Trump’s presidency has been his total absorption into that moment, and vice versa: the nation at large now experiences and engages with things more or less as Trump himself does. Trump didn’t invent this fragmentation, although he’s surely done his part to hasten it. Two decades of steepening precarity and endless war and relentless grinding political failure created the conditions necessary for someone like Trump to get nominated and elected (and quite possibly re-elected). More crucially, though, the past 20 years also helped create Trump’s uniquely cynical, uniquely credulous worldview. Nothing connects, nothing is really related to anything else beyond the sort of anxious and amorphous grievance that Trump’s favorite news shows sell; nothing seems to bind yesterday’s events to today’s, or today’s to tomorrow’s. Trump is certainly not the first purebred dunce to occupy the Oval Office, but it’s hard to imagine any previous president being as obviously overmatched and confounded by the basic day-to-day continuity of it.

Trump’s world resets every morning at the moment when he first turns on the television. He reacts to what he finds there, every day, like a cornered animal.

Trump’s world resets every morning at the moment when he first turns on the television. He reacts to what he finds there, every day, like a cornered animal; he doesn’t take any kind of lesson from any of it, because he doesn’t take any kind of lesson from any kind of experience. It’s why he is not really anything like a full person, but it is also why he is, and how he has been, president. Every single day, the sprawling and metastatic pandemic that he has willfully and childishly botched and only grudgingly ever addressed reasserts itself, and every day, as his stormy moods move him and as the day’s media coverage directs him, Trump takes a different tack on it. That response may reflect some political calculation, but never for very long. Every day is a new fragment of an endless blundering present, and tomorrow will be both different and the same. He has lived this way all his life.

Trump is a creature and creation of the news cycles that he first came to dominate and then replace entirely. American life is as craven and irresponsible and toddlerishly testy as Trump himself, but he never could have become president—never would have bothered to run in the first place—if that weren’t already the case. An insistent and defiant and proudly unteachable stupidity locks it all into place. It makes sense, then, that Trump has spent so much of his presidency looking for some kind of war; it also makes sense, given who he is, that he hasn’t quite been able to commit to one. Nine days after belatedly declaring a national state of emergency last month, once a real crisis finally found him, Trump faced the press and said, “A number of people have said it, but—and I feel it, actually: I’m a wartime president. This is a war. This is a war. A different kind of war than we’ve ever had.”