We were treated to another Presidential Circus on Thursday when Kanye West met Donald Trump in the Oval Office for the Narcissism Summit. That followed a morning where the president spent nearly an hour reprising his role as Cantankerous Giants Fan Calling Into WFAN, ranting to the geniuses on Fox & Friends about this and that until they once again tried to hang up on him. He spent the night before doing more Fox News interviews, holding a fundraiser, and throwing a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, the stage for his latest in a pattern of authoritarian spasms steadily growing in intensity.

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All the while, though, the Florida Panhandle—and, soon enough, Georgia—was dealing with the worst storm ever to make landfall there. Hurricane Michael slammed into the Gulf Coast as a Category 4 with 155 mile-per-hour winds. It was the most powerful storm to hit the United States in 50 years. Eleven people are confirmed dead. Entire communities have been wiped off the map. Houses were yanked off their foundations and sent rolling down the street. But Trump has devoted a huge chunk of his time in the aftermath to bathing in the admiration of the Ralph Steadman figures who show up to his rallies, and to, in the words of Anderson Cooper, "basking in the warm glow he no doubt feels when the cameras are rolling, when he is centerstage, and when a famous person is praising him to his face."

That observation was part of a remarkable segment Cooper put together last night, in which he placed footage of the Donald-Kanye summit next to footage of the devastating aftermath of the third-most violently powerful hurricane ever to strike this country.

The first Kanye clip was the most revealing in an otherwise nonsense production geared only towards garnering attention for both parties.

West's monologue describing his disappointment with Hillary Clinton—that her slogan, "I'm With Her," was insufficiently focused on men's wants and needs—and his declaration that going MAGA has restored his vision of his own masculinity and made him feel like he can "play catch with [his] son" is enormously revealing and achingly tragic. West seems to openly embrace the red hat he's wearing as a bandaid for his fragile masculinity, a way to paper over the gaping cracks in his own self-conception. It's a glimpse into the deep psychological undercurrents of this movement.

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But more to the point, Cooper's segment was a stunning reminder of what should be an obvious concern: the president is not doing his job. Does anyone really believe he is? It seems more likely that his enablers in the Republican Congress and in the media are simply content to ignore reports that he spends at least four hours a day watching television. He does not read, be it books or briefing reports, and his staff long ago learned to show him pictures and short bullet points if they want to get through to him. Bob Woodward's book threw into sharp relief that Trump's staff is not just working around him, but, in some cases, counteracting his will in what Woodward called an "administrative coup d'etat."

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Dealing with natural disasters is the kind of foundational presidential responsibility that just needs to get done. But Cooper didn't mince words in assessing Trump's performance in the area:

This president's track record in hurricane response so far includes throwing paper towels at Puerto Ricans; denying that thousands of Puerto Ricans—Americans—died in the aftermath of Maria—died from lack of power or access to medicine and doctors, died earlier and in greater numbers than they ordinarily would have. The president doesn't recognize those deaths—those human beings—as victims of the storm.

You might add that in seemingly every disaster scene he's visited, the president has at some point told the locals to "have a good time." In North Carolina, he indulged in a drawn-out joke about a boat that had washed onto some guy's yard. The episode might have left you thinking, as you watched it, that someone slipped an acid tab in your morning coffee.

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But all that is just "basic social skills" and "having empathy for other human beings." What the president really must do is produce results on the recovery. But Puerto Rico is damning evidence that isn't happening, either. Not only did a shoddy initial effort—one which attracted an intervention from Oxfam, the first time the organization has gotten involved on American soil since Hurricane Katrina—likely exacerbate the death toll, the president then dismissed those death figures as fabricated, erasing thousands of human lives from existence for his own political gain. He did a bad job and, rather than deal with the results, simply called them Fake News.

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The best point Cooper made here also referenced Katrina. The George W. Bush administration's recovery effort there was so reprehensibly poor that many consider it the inflection point—downwards—of his presidency. (Remember when Kanye West saw the Bush effort and declared the president "doesn't care about black people"?) The difference is that Bush faced consequences for poor performance. He had his supporters in the media and Congress, but he could still be held accountable.

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Now that the current president has successfully ensconced himself in an entire ecosystem of misinformation and bad-faith right-wing argument, he is beyond the reach of reality-based observers who've found that, say, his effort in Puerto Rico was horrendous. His Republican allies in Congress allow this because their base voters live in the same ecosystem, and structural realities—including gerrymandering—create an incentive to only cater to those voters. The actual results don't matter. The president will just keep watching Fox & Friends, calling into Fox & Friends, tweeting about Fox & Friends, getting advice from Fox & Friends—until it's time for the next Kanye Conference.