Earlier this year, a Saturday Night Live skit featured a gameshow called What Even Matters Anymore?, “the show where I tell you something our president did or said, and you have to tell me: does it even matter any more?”. In the final round, contestants have to write down what they think “would actually lead to any kind of consequences” for Donald Trump. One idea is “sex tape with Don, Jr”.

But would that even matter? Trump has weathered endless scandals by creating a new one to distract from the last. He’s a carnival huckster running a three-ring circus; there are constant reports that he thrives on chaos, which is nice for him, and devastating for democratic norms and the rule of law. Trump has made it abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that he is amoral. He has no motive other than self-aggrandisement; his only principle is power. When I suggested on Question Time, two days after his election, that Trump had no interest in serving, David Dimbleby scoffed at me, demanding why else he would have run. My recollection is that I goggled and then said: “Power?” Or maybe I said “money”. They both ran through my head, as I tried to absorb the news that an intelligent, experienced BBC journalist was being blinded by norms.

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There is a clear bias among the media towards normality. We see this every time a journalist announces that Trump became “presidential” when he read a few words written by someone else. Trump is not “presidential”. He is ignorant, impulsive, undisciplined, undignified, uncouth. This makes him popular with some of his electorate but it does not make him presidential. We see the bias towards normality every time a journalist asks about a given aspect of his “policy”. Trump doesn’t have policies. He is an opportunistic chancer who changes his story with the wind and listens to whoever last spoke to him. We see it when newspapers refuse to say the president lied, hiding behind euphemisms such as “misrepresented”, “reversed his position”, “told an untruth”.

We saw it when the White House Correspondents’ Association turned on the comedian they had hired to roast the administration. After Michelle Wolf called out White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, for her routine falsehoods and distortions, Wolf was attacked for criticising Sanders’s appearance. But what she said was: “I think she’s very resourceful. She burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies.” That is not deriding Sanders’s looks, it is deriding her mendacity and that of the administration she serves. But it merely prompted retaliatory falsehoods and distortions.

The lies are working. Last week, a Gallup poll showed that the American president has a 42% approval rating. It was the same week he hired Rudy Giuliani, one-time mayor of New York and one of Trump’s surrogates during the campaign, as an attorney (after yet another resignation). Giuliani’s ties to the New York FBI office are widely held to have led to the pressure that prompted James Comey to announce he had reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton, a decision that, on clear evidence, turned the 2016 election.

Play Video 0:56 Trump on Giuliani: 'He'll get his facts straight' on Stormy Daniels – video

Giuliani promptly went on television and declared that Trump had been aware that his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 and that Trump had repaid him. This despite Trump’s repeated denials that he knew anything about the case and his and Cohen’s insistence that Cohen had paid the porn star with whom (they said) Trump had not had sex, out of his own pocket and just before the election, for no particular reason. Trump then said that the 73-year-old former mayor of New York “had just started a day ago” and “would get his facts straight”. In other words, as many tweeted, he would get his lies straight. Then Trump tweeted some more about Robert Mueller’s “witch-hunt” and later called Mueller a Democrat, despite his being a lifelong Republican, in order to claim that the investigation into him is party political.

That was just the last three or four days.

A few months ago, a journalist reported that Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, told him: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” The Trump administration has taken this lesson to heart. There is so much clamouring for our attention in the three-ring circus that no one knows where to look. But we can’t ignore it, for they will keep flooding the zone with shit.

Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany who knew quite a lot about how lies and chaos buttress fascism, has been finding new currency lately. In her book The Human Condition, she wrote: “The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.”

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The social contract is based on the faculty to make and keep promises. Trump is setting fire to it, because he doesn’t recognise promises, or the presence or acting of others, while too many of those others, blinded by ambition or deluded by the lies, support him.

Trump may not be ideological – or consistent – enough to be a fascist. But he is clearly an authoritarian, as his “jokes” about becoming a president for life and demands for military parades attest. He claims to prize loyalty above all else (although he seldom demonstrates it), insisting that government officials offer unquestioning loyalty to him, rather than to their offices, that they worship their “dear leader”. (It’s not a coincidence that he’s so interested in Kim Jong-un.) This is the allegiance demanded by fascists and mafia capos.

In 1937, a journalist named Dorothy Thompson, who was one of the voices of the American anti-fascist cause, wrote: “The enemy of Fascism is reason… Its enemy is humanism.” When they flood the zone with shit, we must counter it with reason and humanism. We have no choice, because of course it matters.

• Sarah Churchwell’s Behold, America has just been published by Bloomsbury