Donald Trump had himself a night on the Internet yesterday, interrupting family-dinner preparations across the country by starting another Twitter beef with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un using language typically employed by two drunk bros in a bar challenging each other to a dick-measuring contest. "I too have a Nuclear Button," explained the president of the United States, "but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"

Sixteen minutes later, his need for attention not satiated by pushing the Doomsday Clock a few millimeters closer to midnight, he announced plans to reveal "THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR" on Monday at 5 o'clock, implying that some kind of ceremony will take place in which he—or someone in his orbit—will present awards in various categories to various members of the "Fake News Media." No official word yet on how the American people will be able to tune in, but presumably the hosts of Fox News' The Five now have next Monday's A-block taken care of.

Unfortunately, neither casually threatening nuclear annihilation nor attacking journalists who report stories that hurt his feelings qualifies as "out of character" for our Tweeter-in-Chief anymore. But his decision to do those things without prompting—that North Korea story was 24 hours old, man—and in such startlingly close proximity to each other lays bare a dynamic that might be a little bit funny if it weren't also a whole lot of terrifying: Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is bored.

There is no master plan, no 4-dimensional chess game being played. The president just likes to stir shit up. This might seem inconceivable, given that you, a functional adult, understand that being commander-in-chief of the world's most powerful nation is not a job in which one should feel bored. But until the moment he sat down in the Oval Office, Trump had spent his entire life operating as a freewheeling media celebrity whose success was measured by the number of times his name appeared in the gossip magazines. He went on Howard Stern. He wrestled Vince McMahon. He had his own primetime show, with a cool catchphrase and everything! Being Donald Trump—if not the man, then the character who millions of Americans saw on TV, at least—was fun.

Winning the White House in 2016 proved to be the highest-rated episode in the The Trump Show's 70-year run, but the job he now has to do involves a lot of sitting in drab conference rooms listening to John Kelly use words he's never heard to discuss subjects he doesn't understand. For a man with the attention span of a hummingbird, this is neither fun nor exciting. And so, when his eyes start to glaze over after his third straight hour of meetings in which his name hasn't been mentioned enough for his linking, he hurries anxiously out of the room until he manages to do something that makes him feel relevant again.

A man whose bored musings take precedence over things like the First Amendment and/or the viability of human life on Earth puts billions of people in danger. Donald Trump can't comprehend this, though. For him, the presidency is just another phase in his lifelong pursuit of those dopamine hits that come every time he sees his name in the headlines—the bigger the font, the better.