Trump’s involvement in all this isn’t universally—or even mostly—malicious, but looking at the president’s involvement in make-believe over four decades does reveal a spectrum of truth-bending. Far on one side is the playful end. That’s where you’ll find Trump doing scripted wrestling stunts and strutting around on The Apprentice. Opposite that is the manipulative and maybe even authoritarian side of the spectrum—where he’s peddled Birtherism and made increasingly disturbing attacks on the free press.

The curious thing about all this is the extent to which these various performances of alternate reality converge. In 2017, Trump’s previous pro-wrestling playacting dovetails neatly, and in gif form, with an attack on the Fourth Estate. And his tabloid-fueled, campaign-trail instigations about the JFK assassination—he suggested the father of a political opponent, Ted Cruz, was somehow involved—are the backdrop against which the public must attempt to contextualize a presidential decision about open records.

“Subject to the receipt of further information,” Trump tweeted Saturday morning, “I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.”

Trump’s announcement came a day after his longtime confidant Roger Stone went on Infowars, a radio show and website known for spreading conspiracy theories, and announced that Trump would not block the release of the documents, which are set to be issued by the National Archives in the coming days. Earlier that day, Politico Magazine had published an in-depth piece saying that Trump would likely block the release of the files.

Here’s the thing that happens, apparently, when a conspiracy theorist becomes president of the United States: The lines between decision and reaction blur. The American people are accustomed to public officials spinning their way through public office. No president has been truly forthcoming with the electorate. Many have misled the American people.

Yet Trump isn’t just indifferent to truth, as any neutral party can see; and he isn’t solely set on deceiving the public, despite what many of his critics insist. Donald Trump isn’t even first and foremost a performer. He’s a pretender. And he has a preternatural sense for what people want him to be.

So when Donald Trump suggests he will help the public access long-secret JFK files in the name of transparency, he’s doing it with the same talent for identifying the kinds of stories that captivate people that he’s leaned on his entire career. (Those who have studied the JFK assassination closely are mixed on the potential significance of these files. “I’ve always thought that the release of these documents is going to be something like what happened on New Year’s Eve 2000,” Josiah Thompson, the author of Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination, told me on Saturday. “A great big zero of happening!”)