Friday’s inauguration taught me three lessons about the political dynamics of our televisual age, as mastered by an expert at reality television, our newly inaugurated president. These lessons may give us some insight into what is to come, not just in this administration but in U.S. politics generally.

Once upon a time, in the early American republic, politics was about talk. Sam Adams, the Sons of Liberty and the Committees of Correspondence built interlocking conversations throughout the colonies that drove a revolution. Town committees linked to state-level conversations, and these linked to conversations in the Continental Congress. These days we no longer really have a functional system of interlocking conversations.

Instead, we have politics as mass performance. Yet most politicians haven’t fully awoken to this. As one after another walked down the interior steps of the Capitol, preparing to emerge before the crowd, only one, I think, found the CNN camera, looked into it and waved. That was Donald Trump.

He has, of course, made telegenic qualities a notable characteristic of his Cabinet picks. Mike Pence, he said, just before selecting him as VP, was straight from central casting, and so he is. He said the same about Mitt Romney when he auditioned for secretary of state. His actual choice Rex Tillerson is not too far behind Romney in televisual charisma.

This lesson about performance helps make sense of some of Trump’s policy commitments. It doesn’t really matter how well a wall across the southern border would work. First and foremost, it’s a prop for the performance of sparing no effort on behalf of America’s protection.

Trump aims to perform a tireless and limitless effort to protect the American people; he also means to perform greatness. Here’s where the second lesson comes in.

The ancient Greeks used to argue about the content of greatness. What was the highest excellence? Was it intelligence? Beauty? Strength? Or perhaps it was something else altogether, something finer still? Indeed, they decided that it was, and they called that finer thing virtue, a capacity for wisdom, justice and moderation.

In the early republic, politicians such as George Washington sought to perform the excellence of virtue. Without being particularly performative, the Obama administration chose intelligence — that is, policy wonkishness or book learning — as its most esteemed form of excellence. For his definition of greatness, Trump has chosen a combination of male strength and female beauty, the latter tightly defined by the example of his wife and daughters. As he sets out to make America great on his own terms, this conception of excellence is his north star.

This brings me to my third inaugural lesson. The way Trump performs greatness, as he understands it, is simply by winning. In order to win, he needs adversaries. This means his administration will be a constant pageant of generating adversaries for the sake of having them. So that then he can try to diminish and defeat them. And be a winner. And thereby be great.

There will never be any calm in this administration, any unity. Trump’s conception of greatness depends on the production of targets for his displays of domination.

I realized this when, in his speech, he tried to issue a kingly “decree”: “From this day forward . . . it’s going to be only America first.” He knows that this slogan was used by Nazi sympathizers in the 1930s. He knows it drives his adversaries crazy when he connects his vision to that history. He nonetheless insists on using this phrase. This earns him credit with his supporters who believe it’s reasonable to give “America First” new meaning in the 21st century and who see his pugnacious persistence with the phrase as punching through a stifling political correctness.

But he isn’t using this phrase just for his supporters. He’s using it for everyone else, too, and for a different reason. He knows he’s pushing their buttons, and he wants to. Because then he will have people to fight. And then he can have the fun of lambasting them and conjuring the need for law and order in response to the excesses in their behavior, for which, yes, they are responsible, but which, nonetheless, a sophisticated rhetorician can also effectively stir up.

Trump has seen that in our televisual age politics is importantly a matter of performance. In an ideal world, mastery of this dimension of our political universe would be tethered to the traditional work of linked political conversation at the many levels of our system. A presidential performance would open up room for real political work to be done, for instance, in Congress. We’ll have to wait to see, in this instance, whether performance and politics work together or come apart.

But we already know what the performance will be. Trump will consistently produce pageants of telegenic beauty, prepare to protect his beauties from all comers, drum up adversaries, beat them down and generally perform broad-brush acts of apparent protection on behalf of this beautiful country.

Unless, of course, all those potential adversaries stop taking the bait. That’s what it will take to turn the tables on the political dynamic now in place. How to do that? Democrats, you might, for instance, start saying how much you loved Trump’s speech — all that talk about infrastructure investment — why, you might have written it yourselves.