Before taking the stage at his Florida rally on Saturday, President Donald Trump was asked whether it wasn’t a mite early in his term to start campaigning again. “Life is a campaign,” he replied. “Making our country great again is a campaign. For me, it’s a campaign. To make America great again is absolutely a campaign.” With these words, Trump implicitly promised that he’s going to continue to act as he has since June 2015: holding large rallies where he feeds off the sinister energy of a riled-up crowd, lashing out against his imagined enemies in the press, the Democratic opposition, and even backsliding Republicans in Congress.

It’s hardly a surprise that Trump would rather campaign than take up the less flashy, more private chores of actual governing (attending meetings, reading briefing reports, negotiating with legislatures, helping draft laws). For almost all of his adult life, he has been a lover of the limelight, ever hungry for the validation of public attention, from seeing his name in print to becoming a reality show star. And campaigning is the aspect of politics closest to such media spectacle.

Trump’s real focus can be seen in his behavior since winning the election. In an unusual move, he kept his election campaign organization together after the election to lay the groundwork already for his 2020 reelection bid. As president-elect, he held rallies to thank his supporters in states like Ohio. In his press conferences and on Twitter, he has stayed on campaign mode, focused in reiterating slogans like “make America great again” and on attacking his foes (as in a tweet defining the media as “the enemy of the American people”).

As University of Houston Professor Robert Zaretsky argued Monday in The New York Times, Trump is a vindication of Guy Debord’s theory, expressed in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle and a follow-up two decades later, that we live a world where media-driven image saturation has overwhelmed traditional civic engagement. In this televised carnival, Trump is the ringmaster.

Since [inauguration], as each new day brings a new scandal, lie or outrage, it has become increasingly difficult to find our epistemological and ethical bearings: The spectacle swallows us all. It goes on, Debord observed, “to talk about something else, and it is that which henceforth, in short, exists. The practical consequences, as we see, are enormous.” Indeed. Who among us recalls the many lies told by Trump on the campaign trail? Who can re-experience the shock felt when first seeing or hearing the “Access Hollywood” tape? Who can separate the real Trump from the countless parodies of Trump and the real dangers from the mere idiocies?

Trump’s constant campaigning is not only shaping how the public understands his presidency, but the operation of the presidency itself. This is why, in terms of governance, Trump is already shaping up to be a disaster.