“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he said on January 20, 2017. Instead, his hyping of carnage has continued almost unabated, this week popping up as a counterpoint to wrenching stories about infants taken from their mothers at the border.

Conventional wisdom holds that at a time when the economy is booming, a president should be popular (Trump is not) and that a president would focus on that booming economy. (Trump isn’t doing that either.) He does fitfully boast about the economy, but it’s usually through the lens of complaining that the media won’t cover it. The media is usually too busy to cover it because they’re busy covering whatever crisis the White House has concocted that week. And the White House has concocted that crisis because it’s a way to bind the president’s supporters to him.

Trump is not a president for a time of smooth sailing and optimism; the only thing he shares with Dwight Eisenhower is a love of golf. Trump has styled himself a president for times of crisis. If things are good and boring, voters are apt to gravitate to a boring, competent administrator—a Jeb Bush or a Hillary Clinton, for example. Only in a moment of disaster would they gamble on Trump. Besides, Trump himself would be deadly bored if everything was going well.

So he keeps creating crises. His genius is focusing attention. He’s not an especially effective administrator of the federal government—it’s more shambolic than ever—and he’s not good at enacting laws, as demonstrated by his tiny list of legislative achievements. He can create a spectacle and draw eyeballs to it, though. Sometimes these crises work out well for him. His assault on NFL players over the national anthem seems to have riled up his supporters, and he successfully bullied NFL owners into a defensive position. In other cases, however, he overreaches. His statement that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville didn’t go over well. Neither, as it turned out, did separating infants from their parents.

Part of the reason is that even as Trump focuses attention, he’s not especially good at changing hearts and minds. This is why his approval rating remains low—though surprisingly stable, given the constant parade of crises.

Take immigration, for example. As Christopher Ingraham details in The Washington Post, the immigration crisis is not, in any sort of quantitative way, an actual crisis. There is no large upsurge in illegal immigration—apprehensions are near long-term lows; the numbers of immigrants entering the country are small in absolute terms; and despite the brutality of the gang MS-13, unauthorized immigrants appear to actually commit significantly less crime than the general population.

Yet Trump has managed to instill a sense of crisis around immigration. In 2016, just 7 percent of Americans told Gallup immigration was the country’s most important problem, placing it in the middle of the pack. In November 2017, it was down to 6 percent. By May, however, it was up to 10 percent, good for third place. (Looking at some of the other problems cited by Gallup respondents, it’s easy to see why Trump would rather focus on immigration: “dissatisfaction with government/poor leadership,” “race relations/racism,” “unifying the country,” “ethics/moral/religious/family decline,” “lack of respect for each other”—he doesn’t score well on any of these.)