It may not seem like that big a deal; there are certainly worse things happening around the Trump administration. But it’s emblematic of the larger problem we confront: At this moment of unprecedented crisis, in the midst of a pandemic and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the president himself — and consequently, much of the administrative structure that surrounds him — is focused intently not on dealing with the practical challenges that confront the nation but with putting on a show.

For decades, some have worried that the spectacle of politics was overtaking the substance. In 1960, they huffed about a young and handsome John F. Kennedy using his charisma to defeat the more experienced Richard M. Nixon. In the 1980s, they lamented that a former movie actor and his team of image-makers could use their mastery of television to such great effect, creating an almost fictionalized presidency.

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But every previous president used the spectacle as a way to package and sell substance. With Trump, the spectacle is the substance. It’s not a tool to build and maintain support for an agenda. It’s the beginning and end, the whole purpose of the enterprise.

As of Wednesday morning, more than 600,000 covid-19 infections had been reported in the United States and more than 26,000 Americans have died (officially; the true number is almost certainly much higher). Job losses are now projected to reach 25 million or more.

Confronted with this emergency, the president somehow has the time to spend up to two hours or more every day in the White House briefing room, insisting that his performance has been spectacular and haranguing reporters who fail to offer him enough praise.

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While the virus was spreading across the country in March, Trump was making plans for a two-hour, daily radio call-in show that he’d star in. (The idea was eventually dropped because he didn’t want to compete with Rush Limbaugh.)

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And now he is determined to “open the country” on May 1, just two weeks from now, a date not dictated by public health reality but by his worries about reelection. On Tuesday, he read off a list of 200 names, mostly corporate CEOs, who are supposedly going to “advise” him on how to do it. If more than a few of them ever do so much as get on a conference call, it will be a surprise.

Never mind that the president does not have the authority to simply declare that we must all now return to the way things were; lockdown orders were issued by governors, and they’re the ones who have the power to lift them.

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But that doesn’t actually matter, because what Trump is planning isn’t an opening of the American economy. It’s a show in which he pretends to have opened the American economy.

Not everyone who works for Trump is spending all their waking hours planning this show. But even the ones who are concerned with policy have to work around a president who cares only about making sure the curtain rises on time, even if it means everyone in the theater getting sick.

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So what exactly will happen on May 1? Governors across the country are putting together their own plans in cooperation with each other for how to lift the lockdowns and resume economic activity — but the rollout of those measures will happen gradually as the public health situation allows and may not begin being put into effect for months.

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That won’t be good enough for Trump. He wants a dramatic moment focused on himself. So he’ll probably stage a Rose Garden ceremony where he can stand amid some corporate executives and members of his Cabinet. After each offers the usual tributes to his majestic leadership, he will declare that the crisis is over and the United States is now officially open for business. The assembled sycophants will clap and cheer.

Maybe they’ll even have a banner. It could say “Mission Accomplished.”

And then what? We’ll read stories in the subsequent days in which anonymous administration officials explain how empty and chaotic the effort was, along with their fear that we could be giving the virus new life. A few red-state governors will announce that now that the president has given the go-ahead, they’re encouraging everyone to go back to work.

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But in most of the country, the stay-at-home orders will remain in place and not much will change.

If we didn’t understand it before, we certainly should now: The problem isn’t that we elected the former star of a reality-TV show to the White House. It’s that we elected someone who didn’t know when to stop worrying about the show and to start worrying about the reality. Now we’re seeing the damage he can do.