It hasn’t been a particularly good month for the grandiose hothead in the Oval Office. Just as the chaos within the West Wing was starting to resemble the economy section of a United Airlines flight, the president dipped into the nation’s pocket and blew $60 million worth of Tomahawk missiles on an attack on Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad after Trump was shown images and TV reports that Assad had used what was later determined to be sarin gas on civilians, including children. The gas attack was horrific; the U.S. response, impulsive and ineffectual (and a reversal of Trump’s own stated policy). It told the Syria-Russia coalition that Trump was unpredictable and given to showy gestures—a description all too familiar to most Americans these days. More to the point, it diverted the press and the public’s attention from the Trump-Putin coalition, which many believe will ultimately be the president’s undoing.

You’re not alone if you think you are living through an Allen Drury novel—or, depending upon your age, Dr. Strangelove or Wag the Dog. Sean Spicer, the poor fellow, is living through his own episode of South Park. In the B.T. (Before Trump) era, most people I know went about their daily lives reasonably confident in the knowledge that the papers or news sites they read that morning were all they needed to stay informed for the rest of the day. But now, A.T., all that has changed. Those same people check their phones with the regularity of lovelorn teenagers—wincing as they look to see what fresh horrors the great man in the White House has unleashed. Trump may thrive on conflict and disorder, but most of us do not.

When Doris Kearns Goodwin named her book about Abraham Lincoln’s fractious Cabinet Team of Rivals, she didn’t just leave it at that. Central to her theme was the role played by Lincoln himself, who single-mindedly pursued his vision with skillful opportunism. He drew on the strengths of his advisers, understood their weaknesses, and as needed played them off one another.

And now we have Trump, who has assembled his own fractious White House team. It’s a creature born not of forethought but stitched together from various body parts collected along the way. As Sarah Ellison points out in “The Westeros Wing,” with the exception of the two family members, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, no one else on the team—not Bannon or Priebus, not Miller, Cohn, Conway, or Pence—really knew Trump a year ago. They have widely differing worldviews and political agendas. What unites them is a lack of experience and a sharp-elbowed personal ambition. They also function (if that is the right word) in the happy realization that conflict of interest isn’t something to be avoided but rather the very point of Trump White House service. Ellison describes the large, omnipresent flies that buzz around ceilings of the West Wing because the windows, for security reasons, don’t open. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Of all the White House jobs Donald Trump has filled with his relatives, one is actually legitimate, with historical bona fides: the unpaid job of First Lady. As Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer A. Scott Berg told V.F. contributing editor Evgenia Peretz—for “He Comes First,”—one of the First Lady’s foremost duties is to “assuage that loneliness” which comes with living in a mansion that President William Howard Taft called “the loneliest place in the world.”

So far Melania doesn’t get high marks for loneliness-assuaging, having forsaken the White House for the family’s Trump Tower apartment, in Manhattan—a decision that costs taxpayers around $140,000 a day for the extra security this involves.

Historically, being First Lady has entailed other important duties. These include being a role model and championing a worthy cause. Think of Nancy Reagan and her “Just Say No” to drugs campaign; Barbara Bush and literacy; Betty Ford and her very public battles against breast cancer and substance abuse.