The question of intentionality is impossible for anyone but Trump to answer, and he would surely answer it by claiming that he has had a plan all along. That would be a typically Trumpian boast. That aside, however, it is undeniable that the exhausting storms that mark political life in Washington obscure the ruthlessly effective work happening across the federal government.

That should explain why, when I spoke with Bannon for my book on Trump’s Cabinet, he said he thought “Reince did a terrific job,” adding, “People said it was too loosey-goosey. Well, but that’s kind of Trump’s style. You have to let Trump be Trump.” Trump at his Trumpiest was Trump sitting at the Resolute desk, happily signing executive orders: to impose the “Muslim ban,” end the Trans-Pacific Partnership, accelerate work on the Dakota Access Pipeline. It was Trump tweeting about no collusion, trolling the media and the Resistance with every ungrammatical missive.

“It was brutal,” Bannon remembered. “Every day was a knife fight.”

Maybe it didn’t have to be so brutal, and maybe the knives didn’t have to come out every morning. The mere appearance of battle, whether with congressional Democrats, Wall Street free-marketeers, or most of Europe, has often been enough to distract journalists and the rest of America from what has been fomenting just beneath the surface.

The diversionary maneuver has been so effective because Trump remains an object of intense public fascination. If nothing else, Trump is an effective distraction from Trumpism, which is to say a kind of raw modern Republicanism that has shed the last vestiges of its eastern-establishment roots. The more Trump acts like Trump, the more it seems to the rest of us that his administration is about to collapse into a heap of faux-golden shards, the more the Trump administration actually gets done.

Just so, the news on February 14, 2017, was largely focused on Trump’s fleeting National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and the improper contacts he’d had with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition, as well as on whether Trump had tried to stop FBI Director James Comey from investigating Flynn.

That same day, Trump and the Republican Congress rolled back a Barack Obama–era rule that required energy companies to disclose payments they received from foreign governments. They did so quietly—though hardly in secret—using the Congressional Review Act, the brainchild of Newt Gingrich. Passed in 1996, the law gives Congress 60 days to review any new rules. If it does not like the rule, Congress can vote to nullify it. Congress attempted to use the CRA against Obama on five separate occasions, but he leaned on his presidential veto powers to block each of these efforts. The CRA was not used at all under Bill Clinton, and only once under George W. Bush (to cancel a workplace-ergonomics program that Clinton implemented).