On Monday, Donald Trump attended his first board meeting at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts since installing himself as its chairman and firing its leadership. During the session, he surveyed board members about which musical was better—“Les Misérables” or “The Phantom of the Opera”—and reminisced at length about seeing the 1982 Broadway première of “Cats” from a fourth-row seat that he’d been given. “They were treating me good because I was a young star,” he theorized, while strongly implying that he had attended the play with someone other than his wife. He fondly recalled the “gorgeous” young dancers lying onstage and the brilliance of the star singer, Betty Buckley. “Is Betty Buckley still alive?” he asked, mid-soliloquy. (She is, and is not a Trump fan.) The point, such as it was, seemed to be that he wanted to have a lot more “Cats”-style shows at the Kennedy Center, and a lot fewer of the “totally woke” modern productions that one of his fellow MAGA board members complained about during the meeting. Getting down to business, Trump volunteered to host a revamped version of the Kennedy Center Honors, minus the “radical-left lunatics” who had been given the prestigious award in recent years. This, he assured the board, would be good for the center, since he is “the king of ratings, right?”

We know the President of the United States said all this because someone had the presence of mind to secretly tape this inanity and send it to a reporter at the Times. As scoops go, the news value might have been minimal, but the illumination value was high—this is Trump as he sees himself, a brilliant showman who once dreamed of being a Broadway producer, an avatar of middle-brow theatrics indifferent to the arbiters of good taste and trapped in a vision of America rooted in his nineteen-eighties heyday. If the crowd loved it, then so did he. The great Times photographer Doug Mills captured Trump during his Kennedy Center visit, standing on the balcony of the Presidential box, staring down at the orchestra below in a pose that evoked his all-time favorite Andrew Lloyd Webber show, “Evita.” This was no accident. C-SPAN footage shows that Trump produced the shot himself, directing Mills and others to come and get it. “Do you want a little picture like this?” he called down to the journalists. “Perfect,” one responded.

All week, I’ve thought of this scene while watching the others that Trump has orchestrated daily for our national consumption, all of which feature Trump as a sort of Presidential action hero: ordering the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gangbangers in a dramatic Saturday evening operation accompanied by a made-for-TV music video; leading a social-media mob against the federal judge who ordered a stop to the operation in order to make sure it was legal; conducting overhyped negotiations about a so-called peace deal with a Russian dictator who wants no such thing; signing an order to dismantle a congressionally authorized federal department during a glitzy White House celebration of his unchecked power. This is what it means to have a self-styled “king of ratings” as our Producer-in-Chief. There is, in fact, real stagecraft along with the buffoonery. The new gold fixtures in the redone Oval Office, which he proudly showed off to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, are as important to his second-term agenda as his relentless attacks on unelected bureaucrats, out-of-control liberal judges, and trans people using their preferred bathroom. The revolution—or, in this case, the culture war—must be televised.

The havoc that Trump has wreaked on America, and the rest of the world, in his eight weeks back in office requires some restraint in the deployment of this analogy. It’s not right to call what Trump is doing a mere show. His actions, after all, have put thousands of federal-government employees out of work with little regard for what they do or what it will mean when they are no longer around to do it. It’s not a show when the vast majority of American assistance to the poor, displaced, and hungry in the rest of the world disappears overnight. When trials for life-saving cancer drugs end abruptly. When the supply line keeping Ukraine’s military in the fight against Russian invaders is peremptorily halted after an Oval Office meeting gone bad. For too many years, Trump has benefitted from the tendency to view his political career through the lens of theatre criticism, which has the effect of downplaying the threat he poses by casting him as a blowhard who craves the spotlight but cares little for what happens when the cameras are off. I’m thinking here of all the Wall Street types who thought Trump would never follow through on his tariff threats, or the establishment Republicans who have spent years insisting Trump would never abandon America’s allies in favor of dictatorial adversaries.

It’s true that a bigger bullshit artist has never occupied our public stage. But focussing on the spectacle at the expense of understanding what Trump and his allies are actually doing has led to some of the most epically wrong takes in the history of American politics. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” one senior Republican official famously mused to a Washington Post reporter in November of 2020, as Trump refused to give up his false claims about his election defeat. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20th.”

Still, I’d say, ignore the Presidential performance art at your peril. There is no Trumpology that matters without taking it into account. This second term requires a new understanding: the showman is not at odds with the would-be strongman but his accomplice. Trump is neither one nor the other—he is both, always and forever. Welcome to “Trump! the Musical.” Performances are daily. Matinées, too. There is never a down day.

In just the past week of the Trump restoration, the President has signed an executive order that aims to dismantle the congressionally authorized Department of Education, despite no law authorizing him to do so. He has effectively shuttered the Voice of America and its affiliates Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe, silencing one of the country’s main tools for countering authoritarian propaganda overseas. He has invoked a centuries-old, rarely used wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to justify deportations without any due process, such as this past weekend’s flights of alleged Venezuelan gang members. He has sent ultimatums to two Ivy League universities—Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania—to change their policies or lose hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, a sweeping attack on higher education without precedent since the era of McCarthyism.

What’s striking is not just that Trump is picking so many fights across such a broad front but that he’s doing so on purpose. These are not battles he’s blundered into but enemies he’s eager to confront—the more publicly, the better. The show, in other words, is very much of his making. After the U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg confronted the Trump Administration over its deportation flights to El Salvador this weekend, Trump personally waded into the fray. In a social-media post on Tuesday, he called the judge “a troublemaker and agitator” who was taking the side of “VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS.” Impeach him, Trump demanded. The MAGA chorus—the Elon Musks and Marco Rubios, the backbench congressmen and prime-time Fox hosts, the tweeters and the Truthers—immediately took up his cry. The producer was producing again, and this time he has the cast that he wants.

But there comes a point in every day when even Musk leaves Trump’s side, if only to go play video games for a while. What would Andrew Lloyd Webber make of that moment, when the scene fades to black and there’s just an old guy left by himself onstage, all alone with his memory of his days in the sun? ♦